David Tunick, Inc.
Pablo Picasso: A Rarity on the Cusp of the Blue Period and the Rose Period
Pablo Picasso: A Rarity on the Cusp of the Blue Period and the Rose Period
Pablo Picasso
This virtual exhibition is a departure for us in that we are featuring one work only, Les Deux Saltimbanques, by Pablo Picasso. It can occupy center stage on its own.
Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire together regularly visited the famous Cirque Médrano in the center of Paris, where the two young bohemians observed the performers on stage and backstage. The vagrant lives of the acrobats, animal tamers, clowns, and dancers resonated with the two artists, both recent and impoverished arrivals in the bustling capital of France. Picasso's 1905 Les Deux Saltimbanques and Apollinaire’s poem Crépscule (below) effectively convey an intimate, yet lonely melancholy of a class of artistes with which they could identify.
The medium is also a message. Picasso makes the print unique by his careful wiping of gray and black on the surface of the plate and by the rich “burr”, the textured effect resulting from ink spilling literally outside the incised, drypoint lines. The work is in a sense a combination print and drawing, which he reserved for Apollinaire. (There is one other such early impression as rich and extraordinary, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)
Image Credit:
Pablo Picasso, Les Deux Saltimbanques, 1905, drypoint before steel facing
Crépuscule (Twilight)
by Guillaume Apollinaire
Written 1905 as “Spectacle,” published 1909
Brushed by the shadows of the dead
On the grass where day expires
Columbine strips bare admires
her body in the pond instead
A charlatan of twilight formed
Boasts of the tricks to be performed
The sky without a stain unmarred
Is studded with the milk-white stars
From the boards pale Harlequin
First salutes the spectators
Sorcerers from Bohemia
Fairies sundry enchanters
Having unhooked a star
He proffers it with outstretched hand
While with his feet a hanging man
Sounds the cymbals bar by bar
The blind man rocks a pretty child
The doe with all her fauns slips by
The dwarf observes with saddened pose
How Harlequin magically grows
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The young artist in Paris.
The poet, Guillaume Apollinaire.
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There was a second edition of Les Deux Saltimbanques issued nearly a decade later by the art dealer Vollard, but the plate had to be steel-faced to make it last. The resulting impressions are lifeless shadows of the original.
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