Pablo Picasso. Lady with a fan, (c. 1911 and 1918).

Pablo Picasso
Lady with a fan (or Woman with a fan), (1911-18)
Oil on canvas
72 1/4 x 28 1/2 in. (184.8 x 72.4 cm)
Acquired 1944 from Valentine Dudensing Gallery
(AAA00419; L01103; L01377-82)

The following is an excerpt from: Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art. (1948). Painting toward architecture, p. 56. [Essay by Henry-Russell Hitchcock; foreword by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.; introduction by Burton Tremaine; acknowledgements by Emily Hall Tremaine, art director; certain artwork entries by Mary Chalmers Rathbun; graphic design by Bradbury Thompson].

"Picasso’s ’Lady with Fan’ illustrates both of the two successive phases of cubism recognized by specialists as ’analytic’ and ’synthetic’. The underlying painting on this canvas, dating from 1911, breaks up the forms of the human figure into a series of planes set at angles and rendered in delicate touches of near monochrome. This phase of cubism was more sculptural than architectonic in character. Over this painting Picasso in 1918 laid a vigorous pattern of black lines and flat blue areas in the larger-scaled and clarified manner of the later stage of the cubist development. It was from this later synthetic stage of cubism, beginning about 1913, that the abstract artists took off who were most closely associated with the crystallization of the forms of a new architecture in the early 1920s. Such artists were working in France, in Holland in Russia, in Italy, and in Germany before and after the first World War."

The location of Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a fan, (1911-18) is currently unknown. Click to see a photo of the work as installed in 1948 (third photo). Also, click to see another photo of the artwork (Emily Hall Tremaine biography, third photo page after p. 120, direct to pdf).

To learn more about Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a fan from 1947, click the link(s) to articles and exhibition compilations with documentation below.