Page 332 - Swann Galleries - Old Master Through Modern Prints - Sale 2312 - May 1, 2013

422 ● PABLO PICASSO
Femme au fauteuil II: Dora Maar.
Aquatint, scraper, burin and drypoint on Montval laid paper, 1939. 300x238 mm; 113/4x91/4
inches, full margins.The bon à tirer proof, before steel facing and aside from the edition
of 50. Signed and inscribed “Bon à tirer” in pencil, lower right. Vollard watermark. Ex-
collection Fred Feinsilber, his sale at Sotheby’s, Paris, October 11, 2006, lot 269. A brilliant,
richly-inked impression of this extremely scarce proof, with all the details distinct.This
impression cited by Baer.
Picasso (1881-1973) produced over 20,000 artworks in a wide variety of media over the
course of his long, steady career; more than 2,400 of these works were etchings,
lithographs, woodcuts, drypoints and linoleum cuts. His work encompasses an enormous
range of styles and movements, across realism and abstraction, and including Cubism,
Neoclassicism, Surrealism and Expressionism. He made his first prints after he had moved
from his home country of Spain to Paris in 1900, and returned briefly to printmaking in
the 1930s, but the majority of his prints were produced after WWII in close partnership
with various Parisian printmaking/publishing houses including Lacourière and Frélaut,
Crommelynck, and Mourlot. Ceaselessly experimental, Picasso viewed printmaking as a
way of tracking the evolution of his thoughts, where he could preserve an idea through a
print and then continue to build on the concept by revisiting the same plate or stone.
This particular print represents one of Picasso’s many lovers, Dora Maar, who was an artist
herself and closest to Picasso during the late 1930s and early 1940s while she was
documenting Picasso’s process for creating one of his most iconic works, Guernica. Prior
to Maar, Picasso’s primary mistress was Marie-ThérèseWalter, who he met in 1927 when
she was only 17—she was Picasso’s muse and the model for many of his paintings (and
subsequently bore one of his four children). In 1944, at the age of 63, Picasso began an
affair with a 23-year-old art student, Françoise Gilot. He continued to be inspired by, and
seek the company of, younger women well into his 70s.
This print is an example of a bon à tirer, meaning “good to print,” being the final proof of
this portrait before the plate was steel-faced and prepared for producing the numbered
edition of 50 impressions. Bon à tirer prints are particularly significant because they were
the prints Picasso personally scrutinized and signed to indicate the plate was approved for
printing—this specific impression was the model that all prints in the edition were to
match. Bloch 318; Baer 649 II a. [35,000/50,000]