Le Rêve (painting)
| Le rêve (The Dream) |
|---|
| Pablo Picasso , 1932 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 130 × 98 cm |
| Privately owned
Link to the picture |
Le Rêve , dt. The Dream , is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso , signed by the artist and dated January 24, 1932. It depicts the 22-year-old lover Marie-Thérèse Walter of the then 50-year-old artist. It is said to have been created within an afternoon.
Image description
The vertical format is taken by an upper body portrait of a young woman who has taken a seat on a red and yellow armchair. She tilted her head to one side and closed her eyes. Her hands are folded in her blue lap. The slipped straps of her white dress reveal her left breast. A red and yellow pearl necklace plays around the neck. The background is completed by two patterned areas in green and red, which can be used as wall paneling and as a curtain or wallpaper.
plant
The erotic content of the work is repeatedly noted. Some researchers pointed out that Picasso depicted an erect penis, as a symbol of his own, in the upper half of the face of the young woman, for example the Picasso biographer John Richardson . Robert Rosenblum noted that Picasso hid numerous sexual jokes in his paintings. The hands in the lap also indicated a sexual dream. The current owner Steve Wynn said:
“My perception of the sexual aspects of the picture is that if you are a 51 year old man and you have a 21 year old girlfriend, it is Picasso's fantasy, not hers. Any 51 year old man would wish or hope that she dreams about his [erogenous] body parts. Seen in this light [...] a more appropriate title would be Prendre ses désires pour des réalités , or translated 'wishful thinking'. "
Like most of Picasso's works, this is to be understood as autobiographical. All of the images in the series with depictions of his lovers are highly erotically charged. The deviations from visual appearance make it possible to depict experiences that would otherwise not be representable and that are also not accessible to language.
“These images differ from others in their strong, immediate sexuality. Without any ambiguity, they indicate the experience of physical love with this woman. They describe sensual experiences and - above all - the feeling of sexual satisfaction. Even when Marie-Thérèse is clothed […] […], he does not see her any other way: tender as a cloud, carefree, with obvious sensual pleasure and inexhaustible in what she embodies in terms of vitality and feelings. The power that a woman can exercise over a man through her body has been described many times in the literature. But words are abstract and hide as much as they reveal. A picture makes the happy laws of sexuality clear in a much more natural way. One only has to think of the drawing of a breast and then compare it with the associations that this word arouses in general. There are no words for sexuality in its very original sense, at most noises; but there are forms. "
Provenance
Le Rêve was bought by Victor and Sally Ganz of New York City in 1941 for $ 7,000. With this, the Ganz collection took on a significant reorientation; Victor Ganz sometimes described this as a "love affair with Picasso". After Sally Ganz died in 1997, the entire collection, which focused on Picasso, Jasper Johns , Robert Rauschenberg , Frank Stella , and Eva Hesse , was auctioned at Christie's on November 11, 1997 . Le Rêve fetched an unexpectedly high price: $ 48.8 million, which was the sixth most expensive painting at the time (the tenth most expensive if you factor in inflation). The entire collection set a record for private collection sales of over $ 200 million.
The buyer was the Austrian Wolfgang Flöttl , who in the late 1990s also briefly owned Vincent van Gogh's portrait of Dr. Gachet was. In 2001, under financial pressure, he sold Le Rêve to casino magnate Steve Wynn for an estimated $ 60 million.
Incident and last sale
The painting became the centerpiece of the Wynns collection; he also considered naming Wynn Las Vegas after it. In October 2006, Wynn disclosed to a group of reporters and columnists friends, including Barbara Walters , Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi , that he had agreed the previous day to sell Le Rêve to Steven A. Cohen for $ 139 million . At that time it would have been the most expensive work of art to date.
While showing the painting to his friends and gesticulating, Wynn accidentally pushed his elbow through the canvas, causing a six-inch tear in the figure's left forearm. Ephron offered the explanation that Wynn used wild gestures when speaking and suffered from retinitis pigmentosa , which affects his peripheral vision. The potential buyer then jumped out. Wynn later asserted that he understood the event as a sign not to sell the painting.
After a $ 90,000 repair, the painting was restored; the value has now been estimated at $ 85 million. Wynn now wanted to collect the difference of 54 million US dollars to the then agreed sale price of 139 million from his insurer Lloyd's of London , which would have been about his purchase price. When the insurer refused, Wynn filed a lawsuit in January 2007. The case was finally settled out of court in March 2007.
In March 2013, the painting was sold to Steven A. Cohen for $ 155 million .
literature
- John Berger: Splendor and misery of the painter Pablo Picasso. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1973, ISBN 3-499-25045-4 . (Original The Success and Failure of Picasso. First edition 1965; 1983, ISBN 0-679-73725-1 .)
- Francoise Gilot, Carlton Lake: Living with Picasso. Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-257-21584-3 .
- Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington: Picasso. Genius and violence. One life. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-426-26399-8 .
- Ingrid Mössinger, Kerstin Dechsel, Beate Ritter: Picasso et les femmes - Picasso and women . Dumont, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-8321-7529-6 .
- Olivier Widmaier Picasso: Picasso - portrait of the family. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-423-34135-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Holland Cotter: Picasso's Desires: In Lust and After Attention . In: The New York Times . October 23, 2008, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed May 29, 2016]).
- ↑ Alfred Welti: Picasso's work is an encrypted diary with a lot of lies. Interview with John Richardson. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: art - the art magazine . Edition: 04/1998, pp. 32–35, accessed September 7, 2010.
- ^ Say It With Flowers — or Gourds, Goats, Fur Cups, Or Fried Eggs | ARTnews. In: www.artnews.com. Retrieved May 29, 2016 .
- ↑ Las Vegas casino mogul Stephen A. Wynn, who owns Le rêve, told ARTnews, “My take on the sexual aspect of the picture is if you are a 51-year-old man and you have a 21-year-old girlfriend, the fantasy is Picasso's, not hers. Any 51-year-old man would be wishing or hoping that she was dreaming of his body parts. If you take this view, ”he continues,“ a more appropriate title would be Prendre ses désires pour des réalités, translated as Wishful Thinking. ” Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- ↑ “The work you paint is a way of keeping a diary.” In: L 'Intransigeant. Paris May 15, 1932 (Picasso in conversation with E. Tériade, 1932). Quoted from Picasso: About art. Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-21674-2 .
- ↑ Lee Rosenbaum: “Dr. Gachet “Sights: it was Flöttl! CultureGrrl, January 26, 2007, accessed September 7, 2010.
- ↑ a b Marc Spiegler: From dream to nightmare. In: Artnet .de, January 17, 2007 (English). Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- ↑ Nora Ephron: My weekend in Vegas. In: The Huffington Post . October 16, 2006, accessed September 7, 2010.
- ↑ Nick Paumgarten: The $ 40 Million Elbows. In: The New Yorker . October 23, 2006, accessed September 7, 2010.
- ↑ Steve Wynn's Bad Dream. Vegas mogul sues Lloyd's over $ 54 million damaged Picasso claim. In: The Smoking Gun . January 11, 2007. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- ↑ David Glovin: Wynn Settles Suit With Insurance Lloyd's Over a Torn Picasso. Bloomberg, March 23, 2007. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
- ↑ Carol Vogel, Peter Lattman: $ 616 Million Poorer, Hedge Fund Owner Still Buys Art. In: New York Times, March 26, 2013
