Curator, Anne Umland: Why did Picasso go to Fontainebleau in the summer of 1921? Getting away, a retreat.
He and his wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, found a house to rent. They were parents for the first time. Their new baby son Paul was born in February. They struck a balance between a work life, a family life, and socializing.
This house, that the Picassos rented, is still standing. And this very detailed drawing is remarkably faithful to the space.
Conservator, Erika Mosier: When I look at this work, I see this controlled riot of line.
I’m Erika Mosier. I’m a paper conservator at MoMA.
A detail I really like about this work is that if we look at the carpet, he’s given us an indication of the pattern, but he hasn’t drawn the pattern overall. The same thing’s going on with the pictures above the piano. We have the frames, but we don’t have the images. He’s chosen to leave out certain details. I feel like he’s giving our eye the room to process this drawing.
Anne Umland: I love how if you get up close and compare the quality of line that he uses to render Olga Picasso relative to that that he uses to depict the inanimate objects in the room, you can see he’s used a very delicate, much lighter touch in her figure. It’s very intimate. It feels very private. She’s seated at the piano. She’s in the process of turning the sheet music. Her right hand is playing on the keys. And he captures her likeness with just that single profile and the hairstyle and the beads.