My Picasso

October 28, 2021 by joachim

Portrait of Sylvette David in green chair, 1954

I just saw this painting again on twitter. It always gives me a jolt of recognition; it transports me back into high school (the Fürst Johann von Moritz Gymnasium) in my home town in Germany. Some works of contemporary artists were reproduced in our history text book. We are talking 1957 or so, just 12 years after the end of the war.

These textbooks at the time were full of signs of an awakening to a culture Germany had been cut off from, though they were brief in substance when it came to tracing the origins of the nightmare that had been the cause of that lapse. This reproduced painting, a woman’s portrait by Picasso, inspired me so much that I made a copy in the size of the original, using a mechanical tool (Storchschnabel) for enlarging the contours, then I painstakingly copied every oil brushstroke in acryl. It took me a long time. I still have that painting — it followed me around during the many moves between Germany, England and the United States.

It might have been the first painting that I fully embraced as an alternative way of seeing. Of course I had seen abstractions before, but I hardly appreciated them as they seemed to me generic and contrived, without a compelling vision.

Now through the power of the internet I find a picture of the young woman Sylvette as Picasso’s muse. She has a perfection only youth can bestow on some selected women. Seeing this picture wants me to be in the same room with them. I also read that Sylvette was an inspiration for Brigit Bardot, who hung out with Picasso for a time.

[further reading: https://www.pablopicasso.org/sylvette.jsp]