Mar 04, 2021 - Sale 2560

Sale 2560 - Lot 226

Price Realized: $ 11,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
PABLO PICASSO (after)
Buste de Femme en blanc.

Color aquatint, 1930. 550x450 mm; 21 7/8x17 3/4 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 1/125 in pencil, lower right. Printed by Lagausie, Montrouge. Published by Editions des Chroniques du Jour, Paris. A superb impression of this very scarce, early aquatint, with strong colors.

Based on Picasso's (1881-1973) same-titled 1922 oil painting of his first wife, Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955), a Ukrainian ballet dancer and member of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. One of Picasso's early artistic muses and the mother of his son, Paulo, Khokhlova and Picasso met in 1917 in Paris, where she danced in Parade, a ballet by Diaghilev, Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau (1889-1963, see lot 272
) at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Picasso had designed the costumes and set for the ballet. The couple married on July 12, 1918, and their son was born in 1921. Though their relationship deteriorated in the late 1920s, Picasso refused to divorce and divide his property, so Olga remained legally married to him until her death from cancer in Cannes, France, in 1955.