Boy with pipe
| Boy with pipe |
|---|
| Pablo Picasso , 1905 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 100 x 81.3 cm |
| Privately owned
Link to the picture |
Boy with a Pipe (Original title: Garçon à la pipe ) is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso from 1905 , which marks the transition from the Blue Period to the Pink Period by Picasso by adding pink to blue tones. The dimensions of the painting are 100 × 81.3 cm.
Origin and description
Picasso painted the painting in his studio on Montmartre , the Bateau-Lavoir . He has portrayed the young P'tit Louis , a craftsman who liked to watch Picasso at work. The writer André Salmon , a visitor to the studio, reported that one night Picasso had left a group of his friends and went back to the canvas, which he had not touched for a month. Picasso added roses to the portrait of the little craftsman and "made this work a masterpiece" on a whim.
The painting shows a thoughtful-looking boy in a blue suit sitting in front of a pink tapestry with floral motifs. He has moved close to the front edge of the picture, which overlaps the open legs and the right, relaxed arm. He carelessly holds a small pipe in the delicate fingers of his raised left hand. In addition to the finely painted facial features, the right ear appears strikingly large and three-dimensional; it seems to suggest attention, while the facial expression suggests self-absorption. On his head he wears a flower crown with pink roses. The dreamy mood that emanates from this picture can be explained, among other things, with the androgynous beauty of the boy and the floral decorations. The work is one of Picasso's most important works of 1905.
Auctions
On May 5, 2004, the painting Boy with a Pipe was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York via telephone auction for a painting of 104.2 million US dollars (then 58.5 million pounds sterling, almost 85.7 million euros) . The buyer was not named, there are suspicions that it was the businessman Guido Maria Barilla . There was a new record price for a painting by Picasso at an art auction in New York in May 2010. At the auction of Marie-Thérèse Walter 's painting Nude with Green Leaves and Bust (1932) a price of 106.4 million dollars (around 82 Million euros). In 2015, Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger (version “O”) (1955) broke the record price for paintings at around 179 million dollars, and at the same time became the most expensive Picasso ever auctioned.
literature
- Siegfried Gohr : I don't look, I find. Pablo Picasso - Life and Work . DuMont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-8321-7743-0
- William Rubin : Pablo Picasso. A Retrospective, with 758 plates, 208 in color, and 181 reference illustrations , The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thames and Hudson, London 1980, ISBN 0-500-27194-1 (German: Picasso. Eine Retrospective. München 1980 )
Web links
- Provenance and exhibitions , explained at Sotheby’s
- Auction of the painting
Individual evidence
- ↑ Siegfried Gohr: I don't look, I find . P. 54 f.
- ↑ Siegfried Gohr: I don't look, I find . P. 54 f.
- ↑ BBC: Who buys paintings for $ 104m?
