What Makes Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring Modern?

Anne Umland: Today, Anny Aviram, MoMA’s senior paintings conservator, Francesca Ferrari, our former Mellon-Marron Research Consortium fellow, and I will be talking about Pablo Picasso’s monumental Three Women at the Spring, painted during the summer of 1921, in Fontainebleau, France. This is a work that is often described as “classical” or “traditional,” but we were curious about if, and how, it might also be considered “modern” and “innovative.” Our thought was that looking at it together closely and “in detail” might reveal in what ways this is so. We embarked on this close looking in preparation for the exhibition Picasso in Fontainebleau, now on view at MoMA.

AU: Picasso, even when on his summer vacation, was always working! He set up a temporary studio in the villa’s adjacent garage.

FF: Picasso’s Three Musicians, now in MoMA’s collection, and another Three Musicians, which is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were in the same temporary studio on opposite walls. This is one of the many fascinating things about Picasso’s Fontainebleau period: his penchant for painting in pairs.

AU: We also know that at the very same moment—and, in fact, on the very same studio wall—he painted Three Women at the Spring, right next to Philadelphia’s Three Musicians! For me, this latter pair of paintings raises so many different questions, about Three Women in particular, and Picasso’s Fontainebleau period in general. What might have prompted him to want to paint two similarly sized, yet so different looking, pictures that summer? Is he deliberately setting up a compare and contrast? Do we think he worked on them simultaneously? Are there similarities between them, in addition to differences? And is it useful to think about each of these works not only in relation to the present—Picasso’s present, in the summer of 1921—but to the past, including his own pre–World War I Cubist adventures, and his 1917 encounter with ancient frescoes and sculpture in Pompeii?

AU: Returning to the oil on canvas version of Three Women at the Spring, this is a work that Anny recently spent a lot of time with in painting conservation. Anny, can you tell us when you had this work brought up to painting conservation, how long it stayed with you, what you did to it, and why?

Anny Aviram: It was in the conservation studio for over a year. It came to conservation for a closer look in preparation for the Museum’s 2019 reopening after its expansion. The painting was paste-lined before its acquisition in 1952, varnished in the 1970s, and then again in the ’80s with a spray coat of a synthetic varnish. The surface was covered with a layer of dirt, fly specks, small paint losses mainly on the edges, abrasions, and thin scratches. Having it in the studio gave us the opportunity to look at the painting closely with a variety of illumination techniques. As you can see in this detail, this is the area adjacent to the amphora above the figure on the right’s head, illustrating how thinly this area is painted as well as some of the rubbing marks. The priming is commercially applied, but in order to get this watercolor effect with oil paint, Picasso applied an imprimatura, which is a tinted, dilute wash of paint on the priming layer. Scientific examination confirmed that he used a limited palette to execute this painting, including lead white, vermilion, and iron oxide reds and browns. We also confirmed that only oil paint was used for this picture. The paint is applied thickly in some areas, like the hands and heads, while in others it is more thinly applied. He achieves transparencies with his layering technique, particularly noticeable in the skirt of the woman on the right.

AU: It’s interesting to consider the quasi-stone-like character of the right leg, a reminder of the vivid impression that Picasso’s trip to Pompeii in summer of 1917 made on him, and all of the sculptures he saw there. The one medium he doesn’t explore in Fontainebleau is sculpture, so I wonder, is his interest in three-dimensionality playing out here on the surface, in two-dimensional form?

FF: The abraded, layered, matte surface of the work also evokes the practice of mural painting; in fact Picasso was also struck by Pompeii’s frescoes during his trip to the south of Italy. Closer to 1921, and to his summer house, he would have also observed the 16th- to 18th-century mural paintings that are part of the decorative program of the Château de Fontainebleau.

AA: The white paint was the last layer added, and it’s applied more thickly and appears more matte. The makeup of this white paint is currently inconclusive—more testing needs to be done to identify it more accurately. The first step of the treatment for Three Women at the Spring was to dry clean the surface, which we did with a soft brush and different kinds of sponges—including makeup sponges—to eliminate the surface dirt. The next step was to remove the varnish that was causing an overall haze across the entire painting. The small areas noted here are small tests done in all of the colors.

AA: If we look at a pastel from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Head of Woman (1921), next to a detail of the woman on the left from Three Women at the Spring, we can see that with different materials and tools, Picasso uses small strokes to achieve a similar effect in each work to show the highlights and modeling of the women’s faces.

AU: We know from our paper conservator colleagues—Erika Mosier here at MoMA, and Rachel Mustalish at the Met—that such small strokes are not typical for pastels, where traditionally everything is much more smoothly blended. Anny, I am curious: When we looked at the Met pastel in person, my memory is that in certain ways we thought it was “stone-like.” Are the small strokes contributing to that effect?