PABLO PICASSO’S BAIGNEUSES, SIRÈNES, FEMME NUE ET MINOTAURE ONE: A GLOBAL SALE OF THE 20TH CENTURY HONG KONG – PARIS – LONDON – NEW YORK 10 JULY 2020

New York – As part of ONE: A Global Sale of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso’s Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaure (1937, estimate: $6,000,000-9,000,000) will be offered in the New York session. Here, Picasso depicts the projection of an inner self, in the form of the Minotaur, a character lifted directly from ancient mythology. In the late 1920s, Picasso’s interest in Surrealism, especially through his close friendships with Paul Éluard and other poets in the vanguard of the movement, inspired him to take broad license with classical fables, to practice his own method of creative reconfiguration. The artist, moreover, had been writing poetry since April 1935, and, indeed, was at work during 6-19 March 1937 producing a stream of verbal imagery, on 17 March, he wrote “desire so cramped in its prison explodes the eggshell of the sea and lights up the bars that confine it”.

Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaure represents an inventive pictorial narrative used to visualise this “exploding desire” in a free play of iconography that Lydia Gasman described as the artist’s “mythological syncretism, generally based on inversions, the conjunction of opposites, and the conflation of heterogenous elements”.