Pinakothek der Moderne Munich acquires Picasso's Woman with a Violin

Pablo Picasso’s ‘Femme au violon’, created in the spring of 1911, marks the culmination and end point of non-objectivity in Picasso’s Cubist oeuvre and the almost complete dissolution of the object. The composition captivates through the delicate poetry of the pointillistically vibrant brushwork, reduced to grey, brown and ochre tones, and the consistent geometric dissection of figure and instrument. Form and background are linked in a linear grid structure. The stippling application of colour makes the picture pulsate simultaneously in cloudy zones of light and dark.

The development of Picasso’s analytical-cubist vocabulary is now grandly visible in Munich, from the ‘Crystal Bowl’ (1909) to the ‘Fan’ (1910) and the ‘Woman with Violin’ (1911). The juxtaposition of the large-format ‘Woman with Violin’ with George Braque’s highly oval ‘Woman with Mandolin’ (1910), acquired back in 1967, also reveals one of the formative artistic dialogues of the modern avant-garde in the Pinakothek der Moderne in congenial works – the close interweaving of Picasso and Braque during the development of analytical Cubism, which is unique in art history. Until now, the Munich collection has lacked a central work from Picasso’s heyday that is dedicated to analysing the human form.

The painting is of inestimable cultural value for the early reception and establishment of French Cubism in Germany. ‘Femme au violon’ has an illustrious provenance and exhibition history. On loan from the pioneering Parisian art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, it epitomised Picasso’s most recent stylistic developments at the legendary ‘Sonderbund’ exhibition in Cologne in 1912 and, following its immediate acquisition by the collector and art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, was shown at the first German Picasso retrospective at the ‘Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser’ in Munich in 1913. After the work made its way to the famous collection of the Krefeld textile manufacturer Hermann Lange in around 1927 and was passed on within the family through succession, it returned to Munich in 2014 – around a century after its first presentation – initially as a permanent loan to close a significant gap in the Cubism holdings of the Sammlung Moderne Kunst. After the last pioneering Cubist works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris were bequeathed to the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in 1971 by Woty and Theodor Werner, it has now been possible to permanently secure Pablo Picasso’s ‘Femme au violon’ for the Free State of Bavaria through several years of endeavour and thanks to an alliance of six sponsors. This would not have been possible without the early and unconditional commitment of the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation.