BP from Montecito sent me a Picasso print he picked up at a local estate sale. He knows the image is a print, but felt so enchanted by it that he wants to know all about it. He’s unique, in that he adores our Santa Barbara crows.
Picasso executed this work, from 1904, in gouache/watercolor, charcoal, and pastel on paper mounted on board. He used his media to capture a vision of fragility. Many critics of the work say the drawing was laid down in charcoal and pastel first, then washed many times over with gouache. Picasso added the background last. He used his color washes much like a landscape painter of the 19th century used his glazes, thin coatings of color, layered upon layer, to create atmosphere, adding to the depth of a composition. The woman seems to float, and at the same time seems lost in time.
Look at the bottom of the work and you see my point, BP. Washes dissolve the lines of the drawing, leaving the viewer unclear where the woman ends or what supports her. This adds to the mystery of the image; in essence the woman dissolves into the drawing like the bird dissolves into her embrace.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile
In the work we see Marguerite Luc, the daughter of the mistress of the owner of the popular Bohemian Café in Montmartre, Au Lapin Agile. Some sources say the woman in the painting was the stepdaughter of the owner, so maybe mistress became wife at some point. Marguerite married writer and luxury book publisher Mac Orlan, who wanted to paint. Most of the patrons of the Lapin Agile felt a deep connection with art. If they didn’t have the talent to become artists, they lived the Bohemian lifestyle, so well epitomized by the Café in the beginnings of the 20th century. The Café, one of the oldest drinking establishments in Pairs, still stands today at 160 years old.
Marguerite, painted in the Café with the owner’s tame crow, loved animals, as did Frede, her stepfather. Frede became responsible for a famous art hoax involving his pet donkey LOLO. In 1910, the art critic who disliked the direction of ‘modern’ art tied a paint brush to the tail of the donkey and teased the front end of the beast with vegetables. Frede then signed the resultant painting, “Sunset Over the Adriatic,” with the name of a fictitious Italian artist. Art aficionados welcomed the piece with great acclaim to the Salon des Independents where it sold for quite a price.
Frede’s mistress’ daughter loved the Café’s tame crow, as we can see, but so did Picasso, who often drank at the Café. The bird reportedly grabbed a pouch of tobacco off Picasso.
In 1904, when Picasso painted Marguerite, Frede played his guitar in the modest cottage that became the center of Parisian Bohemian life. The Café hosted Picasso, Modigliani, Utrillo, and later Charlie Chaplin paid a debt to its fame by giving its walls a violin serenade.
“Women with Raven”
The year Picasso painted “Woman with Raven” he moved from Spain to Paris. Touches in BP’s painting confirm this happened during his Blue Period. Marguerite’s long, delicate fingers both cradle and echo the shape of the eerie crow. The elongation of the hand and the bird’s feet appear equally spidery and fragile. Note how the shoulders of both the girl and the crow suggest an affinity, a relationship of form and spirit.
The deep blue background, the master’s final touch, he painted after the drawing, as the blue background sometimes overlaps the drawing. This centers the woman in her own world, lost in a blue dream with the crow. Critics remind us that our relationships with Ravens are numinous. Think of Poe’s “The Raven,” black plumage, its croaking call, an ability to mimic speech make the bird a prophet of the unseen.
The year after this painting Picasso ran up a considerable bar bill at the Lapin Agile, and paid owner Frede with one of his remarkable Harlequin paintings called “At the Lapin Agile.” Frede hung this piece on the Café’s walls until he himself became short of cash, then sold it for $20 in 1912. In 1989 Sotheby’s sold the work for $41 million dollars.
“Women with Raven” hangs today at the Toledo Museum of Art.