Lot 56 D

Fernand Mourlot, the famous printer of Picasso's lithographs, recalls: “Picasso came into the print shop, individually greeted everyone there and, in the corner of the studio, discovered zinc plates which were to be ground down. He liked one of them. It was useless to us: a halftone photolithograph that had been used for printing the poster for 'La peinture lyonnaise' at the Orangerie de Tuileries in Nov. 1948. Picasso was very happy about the zinc plate, his find. He took it with him, altered it and brought it back to us the very next day.” (Fernand Mourlot, Picasso Lithograph, Paris 1970, p. 201, no. 238). The painting whose reproduction has been reworked by Picasso was created by the French painter Victor Orsel (1795 Oullins/Lyon - 1850 Paris), who lived in Rome in the 1820s and worked in the circle of the Nazarenes. He portrayed the young Italian Vittoria Caldoni in traditional clothing. She was the favourite model of the Roman artists' colony and was eternalised in a great number of paintings and busts by various artists.
In his reworking of the printing plate, Picasso has gone back over the contours of the face, bonnet and shawl with a few broad strokes, simplifying and substantially deindividualising the portrait. At the same time, he has strongly emphasised the eyes and mouth, providing the unembellished girlish face of the original with a directly glamorous appearance through this “make-up”. A female nude, Pan playing a flute and a Bacchus with a grapevine garland - a typical cast of characters from his Arcadian pictorial world - surround the portrait in a graffiti-like form. In this playful manner, Picasso has definitively made the underlying work his own.