On July 28, Pablo Picasso’s largely unseen Femme endormie (Woman asleep), a charcoal drawing executed on February 4, 1931, is going under the hammer at Sotheby’s evening sale – with an estimate of £6-9 million ($7.6-11.4 million).
The significant price-tag attached to the work – drawings tend to fetch lower sums than their painted counterparts – is threefold: the work is largely unseen, the work is of Picasso’s lover and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter (when their affair was still a closely guarded secret), and the work is both exquisitely rendered and beautifully intimate.
I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.
The drawing is “an absolute gem…” said Helena Newman, worldwide head of Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art department to the Guardian. “[Picasso] has applied a technique which gives an incredible intimacy to the work.”
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“It’s charcoal and is effectively the hand literally almost caressing her. It is just wonderful, it looks back to the great drawings of the Renaissance yet it is so incredibly modern and free and spontaneous and direct. It is like you are looking over his shoulder as he is drawing it.”
It was 1927 when 45-year-old Picasso and 17-year-old Walter met. Describing the moment she met Picasso years later, Walter recalled: “I knew nothing - either of life or of Picasso.... I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together’.”
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At this time, Picasso was still unhappily married to Olga Khokhlova and his relationship with Marie-Thérèse had to remain a secret. Over the decade that followed (Walter was Picasso's secret mistress until 1935, when their daughter Maya was born), Walter provided renewed inspiration for Picasso’s his paintings, drawings and sculptures. Picasso’s grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso said the chance meeting and subsequent affair was effectively Picasso’s rebirth. Many of the artist’s works from this time remain among the best of his career.
When the 1932 painting Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, for which Marie-Thérèse modeled, was auctioned in 2010 for $106 million, it was then Picasso's most expensive on the auction market. Dating from 1931, Femme endormie belongs to this body of work and is a particularly tender and intimate portrait of Picasso’s lover.
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The work has only been exhibited once, at Galerie Beyeler in Basel in 1986. This was where the current owner acquired the work; prior to this, Galerie Beyeler bought it in 1985 off Picasso’s son Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, who acquired it by descent from the estate of the artist.
That Picasso kept the gentle and intimate drawing in his possession until his death is a testament of its importance to the artist.
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