The work"The open window” by Pablo Picasso will be auctioned by Christie's for the first time ever with one presale estimate of £14.000.000-24.000.000.
La fenêtre ouverte it is a rare example of Picasso's surrealist period. Held in the same European collection for half a century, this painting is a surreal representation of Picasso and his great muse Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Painted November 22, 1929, this complex and compelling studio scene is part of a series of Atelier works that Picasso had begun around 1926, richly symbolic and radically constructed paintings that reveal the artist's multifaceted interests at this time. Other works in this series are housed in museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Musée National d'Art Moderne, Le Center Pompidou, Paris. At once a still life, a veiled scene from Atelier and a surrealist distortion of reality, La fenêtre ouverte is rich in personal and artistic symbolism. In the foreground of this painting stand two highly abstract figures. On the right is a plaster bust that appears to be a disguised image of the artist's great mistress and muse of this time, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The figurative object on the left, an amalgam of feet intersected by an arrow, is said to be an abstract and symbolic representation of Picasso himself. In the background, two spiers of the Sainte-Clotilde church are identifiable. John Richardson has suggested that this work therefore represents the secret Left Bank apartment that Picasso and Marie-Thérèse shared as a hiding place during their clandestine affair. In the foreground, a configuration of abstract objects is depicted in an arrangement reminiscent of the artist's earlier Cubist still lifes.
Although Marie-Thérèse had yet to emerge in full form in the artist's work – this would not happen until she created the sentry-like plaster busts in the spring of 1931 – her profile and lock of hair are immediately identifiable in La fenêtre ouverte. Her presence in the artist's life and art was at this point secret, however, the iconic visual language Picasso developed in his portraits of her, in profile and with luminous white face, are already present. Picasso chose to include La fenêtre ouverte in his landmark 1932 retrospective, first held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris from June to July before moving to the Kunsthaus Zurich from September to October.
The painting has also been included in the Museum of Modern Art, the seminal New York investigative exhibition, “Dada, Surrealism & Their Heritage” in 1968.
