Mère aux enfants à l'orange (Mother and children with an orange)

In this Cubist family portrait, Pablo Picasso updates the art-historical genre of maternity − which typically shows Christ seated on the lap of the Virgin Mary − by infusing it with psychological charges specific to modernity. His lover, the French painter Françoise Gilot, is depicted simultaneously as a ghostly woman seated in three-quarter profile and as a stern figure with a prickly, steely-white visage. Severe and remote, she aggressively ignores Picasso’s presence as she balances their daughter, Paloma, on her right arm and clutches their son, Claude, with her left hand. With sharp, menacing fingers, Gilot also suggestively squeezes an orange, a symbol of fertility in early Renaissance paintings such as Jan van Eyck’s' 'The Arnolfini Portrait', 1434 (National Gallery, London). Also drawn from van Eyck’s masterpiece, her dark green dress is another sign of hope and fecundity. More modern in reference are the red, ultramarine and cadmium yellow pigments of Claude and Paloma’s costumes, which recall the high-keyed colours of Henri Matisse’s contemporaneous paper cut-outs.

− 2024

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