Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Paysage à Juan-les-Pins

signed and dated 'Picasso 24' (lower right). oil on canvas. 7½ x 13 in. (18.4 x 33 cm.). Painted in 1924. Est. $500,000 - $700,000 - Lot sold $542,500 

Provenance: Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York.
Anon. sale, Christie's, New York, 21 October 1980, lot 236.
Saidenberg Gallery, New York.
Mr. and Mrs. Leigh B. Block, Chicago.
The Art Institute of Chicago; sale, Sotheby's, New York, 10 May 1989, lot 377.

Literature: C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1952, vol. 5, no. 331 (illustrated, pl. 151).
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculptures: Neoclassicism II 1922-1924, San Francisco, 1995, p. 251, no. 24-182 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Picasso, 1986.
Saint-Tropez, Musée de L'Annociade, Picasso en Méditerranée, 2007, p. 42, no. 11 (illustrated in color).

Notes: In the summer of 1924 Picasso left Paris for the south coast of France, traveling with his wife Olga and young child Paulo down through Marseilles to Juan-Les-Pins. There, rather than the smaller villa he had taken in 1920, Picasso chose one more akin to a small château, complete with Gothic windows, turrets, and crenellated outer walls. The garage across the street was turned into a studio, while the watchtower surrounded by Aleppo pines was chosen as a recurring subject of the landscapes painted there. La Vigie, or the lookout house, was to become a key site marking the gradual abandonment of Classicism for a more distorted, abstract, and even Surreal approach in Picasso's work: "This year, Picasso had sufficient space, privacy, and peace of mind to make a prodigious leap forward" (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, London, 2007, p. 273).

Paysage à Juan-les-Pins is one of a small series of oil landscapes that show the watchtower and surrounding area by day, the scene pervaded by the Mediterranean sea and sun just outside the villa's doors. Rather than the illusionistic use of shading and unbroken contours found in neo-classical works of the preceding years, the sun and sea are denoted by suspended fields of color, vertical smears of red over the yellow suggesting the heat and shimmering effects of the midday sun. Over these suspended fields of color, simple black lines and dots are added to suggest the town, while thin horizontal lines and flecks of white subtly evoke the atmosphere of the sea.

As Josep Palau i Fabre has observed of the fields or stains of color, "these stains are both horizontal and vertical, the latter perhaps more visible because they comprise the object and its reflection in the water, although actually there is no such object, no reflection, and no water. The brushstroke itself, by a process of elongation and with no need for description, creates the idea of reflection rather than reproducing the reflected object upside-down. This use of pictorial matter and of its expressive capacity goes beyond the object represented. The stains are an entity in their own right, a plastic value added to that of the composition as a whole" (in Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama: 1917-1926, Barcelona, 1999, p. 424).

Christie's. Impressionist & Modern Art day sale. 7 May 2009. New York, Rockefeller Plaza. www.christies.com  Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2009