Sylvette and the Picasso Style

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Alexander Adams asks why so little importance is accorded to images of people outside Picasso’s most intimate circle

Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model, edited by Christophe Grunenberg and Astrid Becker

Ever since Picasso’s one-time lover, the photographer and painter Dora Maar (1907–97), observed that when Picasso changed mistresses his ‘style, house, poet, circle of friends, dog – changed too’, the autobiographical reading of Picasso’s art has come to dominate critical approaches to his art. The observation has become the guiding principle of John Richardson’s biographical project. It has become common to refer to Picasso’s art in terms of the Olga (Khokhlova, his first wife) period, the Françoise (Gilot) period and the Jacqueline (Roque, his second wife) period.

Hence vis-à-vis Picasso’s art (his figure painting at least) the idea of authenticity is linked to an emotional /biographical link between artist and subject. This invests particularly potency in depictions of Picasso’s wives, mistresses, children, close friends and fellow artists; commensurately less significance is accorded other portraits. One-off portraits and groups of portraits of individuals seen as peripheral to the artist’s life are therefore considered not only less important but also less serious – frivolous even. This is second-tier art. Thus portraits of mistresses Fernande and Françoise are important and those of Hélène Parmelin and Aldo Crommelynck are bagatelles. Yet what seems to be a straightforward distinction turns out to be only half the story.

In the landmark exhibition of Picasso portraits at MoMA in 1996, great attention was lavished on portraits of Sara Murphy, while the portraits of Parmelin and other subjects were passed over with barely a mention. An unexpressed aspect of assessing Picasso’s portraiture is the matters of taste and fashion. The truth is that the Murphy portraits are accorded attention because they fall within the Neoclassical period (1923), an area of interest to scholars and critics. Portraits of Parmelin, Crommelynck and Sylvette David have escaped critical scrutiny partly because Picasso did not have a strong biographical connection to these individuals but mainly because they fall in the 1945–73 period, one which is less appealing to writers (and collectors). (Picasso knew Sara Murphy no better than he did the other three above-named subjects.) Regardless of any supposed biographical link between artist and subject, neglect is actually a matter of covert deprecation due to a perceived absence of quality. In other words, the biographical interpretation of Picasso is a framework which is applied selectively.

Picasso first encountered Sylvette David (b.1934) in Vallauris, 1954. At the time she was a striking 19 year old Frenchwoman, slim and with her blonde hair worn in a ponytail. In a catalogue interview Sylvette’s self-description is of a naïve bohemian, enamoured of existentialism and jazz, drifting around the south of France. In appearance, dress and character she was the embodiment of youth culture. She was the then-girlfriend of Toby Jellinek, a British sculptor and assistant to a local metalworker. He had trained under Terence Conran and had made a few modern-style armchairs to supplement his income. Françoise says that Picasso bought the chairs because they were so ugly and uncomfortable. Sylvette helped Jellinek to deliver the chairs to Picasso’s house, which was when the artist first met her. Soon after, Picasso asked her to model.

Over the course of two months, Sylvette came to pose in Picasso’s studio. Sylvette (now called Lydia Corbett and resident in Devon) explains that despite the single nude painting of her she never modelled nude; that painting was a work of Picasso’s imagination, as were some of the other paintings. Sculptures and ceramics came later. A selection of Sylvette portraits were exhibited in 1954 to widespread and favourable coverage. The catalogue reproduces some of the magazine spreads of November 1954, which heavily featured photographs of the model alongside Picasso’s portraits. Apparently, it became a craze for girls to wear hair in ponytails à la Picasso following the publication of the portraits.

Since 1954, critics have been dismissive when they have not simply overlooked the sequence altogether. The Sylvette series has been deprecated as a bid to capture the zeitgeist or court popularity. In 2014, for the first time in 60 years, a large group of the Sylvette paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures were assembled for an exhibition, at Kunsthalle Bremen (closed 22 June). The centrepiece of the exhibition was Kunsthalle’s own Sylvette (1954), purchased from a local art dealer in 1955. The catalogue includes an essay explaining how Bremen came to have one of the best public collections of Picasso in Germany of the 1950s. Other essays set the Sylvette series in the context of Picasso’s art of the period and the paintings of Jacqueline that followed.

A quantity of sculpture sprang from Picasso’s encounter with Sylvette: one assemblage and over a dozen folded sheet-metal sculptures. One essay covers Picasso’s working relationship with the craftsmen who constructed his metal sculpture (including Toby Jellinek) and translated those into grand concrete monuments in sites as far afield as Scandinavia and the USA. This piece will be useful for anyone wishing to research Picasso’s sculpture.

If there are works largely neglected by scholars (if anything by Picasso can be said to be overlooked), it is the folded sheet-metal and concrete sculptures. Included is a catalogue raisonné of all Sylvette series works identified, which helps to give a general outline of this group. Intriguingly, the subject herself says that there were originally more pictures in the group (drawings, most likely). Picasso’s prodigious output and tangled legacy will probably prevent any comprehensive overall catalogue raisonné. The 33-volumeZervos catalogue is nowhere near a complete record.

For all sorts of reasons, Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette turns out to be an unexpectedly revealing volume. More than just documenting a particular series, the catalogue demonstrates that the series reveals a lot about Picasso’s post-war work and its reception and consumption.

Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model, edited byChristophe Grunenberg and Astrid Becker, is published by Kunsthalle Bremen/Prestel, 2014. 300pp., 370 mono and colour illus, $60.00 £40.00. ISBN 978-3-7913-5362-3