"HARLEQUIN (LEÓNIDE)" PICASSO (2023) OUNCE

Picasso began the year 1917 with the stimulating horizon of collaborating for the first time with the world of the stage by designing the sets, costumes and curtain for the ballet “Parade”, by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company. A commission that came to him through his friend, the poet Jean Cocteau, with whom he traveled to Rome in February, where the Ballets were on tour, to materialize it. The two and a half month stay in Italy—where he visited Naples and Pompeii—gave Picasso the opportunity to soak up classical and Mediterranean culture and, consequently, to reinforce the neoclassical style (also called “Ingresian”) with which he 1914 had broken the hegemony of cubism. “Parade” is an exceptional testimony of that creative moment of the artist, of intense search and ambivalence of languages, in which he delved into the figurative tradition without giving up continuing to explore the paths opened by Cubism. The ballet premiered in Paris, with great scandal, in May, and then the company undertook a tour of Spain that took it to Madrid in June and July and to Barcelona, to the Gran Teatre del Liceu, in November. Picasso, who had fallen in love with one of the dancers, Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955), whom he would marry in 1919, followed the troupe to Spain and between June and November 1917 he stayed in Barcelona.

This “Harlequin”, of which the Museum preserves a preparatory gouache of the head (MPB 110.231), is one of the various canvases painted during those Barcelona months, and the model is the Muscovite Léonide Masine (1896-1979), dancer and choreographer of the Russian Ballet company since Diaghilev hired him in 1913 to replace Vaslav Nijinsky as first dancer. Transfiguring Masine into “Harlequin,” Picasso once again delved into the iconography of this chameleon-like character from the commedia dell'arte who had starred in many of the paintings of the pink era and who reappears here, bicorn in hand, with a melancholic gesture. unbecoming of his mischievous disposition and without his characteristic mask. The monumentality, the static pose, the chromatic subtlety (the ochres of the flesh and the blues, greens and pinks of the characteristic rhomboidal clothing) and the accentuation of the line compared to the color mark the figuration of this painting, which undoubtedly shows the classic style that Picasso began to alternate with the cubist from 1914 and that in Barcelona, in 1917, bore fruit as successful as this one. At the same time, the piece prefigures the compositions with monumental figures of the early 1920s (from the bathers and nudes of Fontainebleau and Dinard to the series of harlequins of 1923, among others), indisputably grafted with antiquity and classical and with which Picasso was going to conclude his classicist period.

Most of the works that Picasso made during those months in Barcelona remained in the family home and some were part of the Barcelona Art Exhibition of 1919, among them this “Harlequin”, which the artist decided to donate that year to the Barcelona Art Museum. the city. In this way it became the first work by Picasso to enter a public collection. In 1963, with the creation of the Museu Picasso of Barcelona, the work became part of its collection, given that all the municipally owned pieces by the artist were assigned to the newly created museum.