art-Picasso.com

©Pablo Picasso - The brutal embrace, L’etreinte forcee 1900

« previous picture | 1900s | next picture »

From Sotheby's:
In the autumn of 1900 a young Picasso made his first trip to Paris. At this point in his life, he was working as an artist and illustrator in Madrid, but like many artists of his generation he was drawn to Paris as the centre of the artistic world. Arriving there in September with his friend Carlos Casagemas, he stayed for three months during which time he visited the Louvre and made the rounds of the commercial galleries including Durand-Ruel, Bernheim-Jeune and Ambroise Vollard. Inspired by the sights and experiences of this new environment, Picasso filled pages of notebooks with sketches of the people he saw around him, revealing an innate ability for capturing detail and character.
One of the things that struck him on his arrival in the French capital was the sight of couples embracing freely in the street and during his stay he made a number of drawings on the subject as well as producing fully worked pastels showing couples both in the street and in the relative privacy of an attic bedroom. He may have had Edvard Munch’s depictions of the same subject in mind, and he certainly succeeds in capturing the same fervour both in the disposition of the figures and his remarkable handling of the medium. This expressive quality is particularly pronounced in L’Etreinte forcée where the embrace is exaggerated by the twisting forms of the couple and the juxtaposition of the luminous brightness of the woman’s clothing against the darker form of the man.