Lot 63 D

This portrait of Jeanne Salmon (1882-1949) may well have been created at a later point in time, considering that the advanced age of the sitter is recognisable in the features of her face. Jeanne Blazy-Escarpette and André Salmon were married in Paris in 1909. Following Salmon’s return from St Petersburg, where he had worked for the embassy, he went back to Paris in 1904 and joined the leading minds of the artistic avant-garde, such as Picasso, Apollinaire and others. Picasso showed his seminal painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” for the first time at Salmon’s “Salon d’Antin”. Salmon was also successful as a journalist and writer in the years that followed, but he found himself in financial difficulties in the 1930s. Jeanne’s increasing dependency on opium forced him to accept assignments from more or less insignificant journals until he was sent to cover the Spanish Civil War as a reporter.
Mela Muter, the magnificent chronicler of the Paris-based elite of France’s cultural scene, captured her portraits’ sitters – in this case, the wife of the well-known author André Salmon – with a precise sense for their desolate financial situations and their corresponding emotional states.