Christie's London Sale Hits Target as Unseen Picasso Sells for $13 Million

An employee poses for photographers in front of Pablo Picasso's ''Tete de femme'' painting at Christie's auction house in London. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

LONDON (REUTERS).- Pablo Picasso once again proved his appeal to wealthy collectors when the artist's portrait of his second wife Jacqueline was the top lot at Christie's impressionist and modern art sale in London on Tuesday.

"Tete de femme (Jacqueline)", painted in 1963, fetched 8.1 million pounds ($13 million), around double its presale estimate of 3-4 million pounds. The sale price includes buyer's premium whereas the estimate does not.

The painting has not been seen in public since 1967 and has been in the same collection for nearly 30 years.

Jacqueline had an unusually short neck and it is said that Picasso would jokingly exaggerate its size in his portraits -- as in this elongated example.

The result helped the world's leading auctioneer raise 66.7 million pounds from the sale overall, according to provisional results on Christie's website, towards the top end of expectations of between 48.3-69.1 million pounds.

The total is further evidence of a relatively robust art market that has been less affected by the economic crisis than many experts had predicted.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Tête de femme (Jacqueline), signed 'Picasso' (upper right); dated '24.5.63' (centre left); dated again '24.5.63' (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 35½ x 23 in. (90.2 x 58.4 cm.). Painted in May 1963. Sold for £8,105,250 ($12,887,348). Photo: Christie's Images Ltd., 2010

Provenance: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Galerie Louise Leiris), Paris, by whom acquired directly from the artist.
Saidenberg Gallery, New York.
Mr. and Mrs. Leigh B. Block, Chicago.
Saidenberg Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owners in February 1981, and thence by descent.

Literature: Galerie Louise Leiris, Catalogue (No. 18 - série A), Paris, 1964, no. 61.
C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvre de 1962 et 1963, vol. 23, Paris, 1971, no. 279 (illustrated pl. 128).
D. Geis (ed.), Picasso, 29 Masterworks, New York, 1980 (illustrated).
The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973, The Sixties I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 63-163 (illustrated p. 381).

Exhibited: Dallas, Museum of Fine Arts, Pablo Picasso, A Retrospective Exhibition, January 1967.
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 100 European Paintings & Drawings From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Leigh B. Block, May - June 1967 (illustrated pl. 42); this exhibition later travelled to Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, September - November 1967.

Notes: Painted in 1963, Tête de femme (Jacqueline) perfectly encapsulates both the tenderness and the ceaseless thirst for innovation that characterised Picasso's portraits of his second wife. Picasso had met Jacqueline Roque in Vallauris in the early 1950s, where she was working as a salesperson for Picasso's great collaborators in the field of ceramics, the Ramiés. Picasso had indeed moved to Vallauris in order to be able to tap into its ancient history and expertise of ceramic production.

Within a short time, Jacqueline was featuring in his pictures and, by the time Tête de femme (Jacqueline) was painted two years into their marriage, which had taken place in 1961, she was well on her way to consolidating her position as the most frequent and important of all of Picasso's Muses and models. Picasso's life has often been divided, for instance in William Rubin's 1996 catalogue Picasso and Portraiture, into periods according to the influence of his lovers, including Fernande, Marie-Thérèse, Dora and Françoise amongst others; Jacqueline was Picasso's last love, a fact that was reflected in the decision to marry her. Likewise, Jacqueline was one of the most important figures in his life, protecting the artist from the increasing demands that came as the cost of his incredible fame and reputation at the time. Indeed, a decade later she would herself become instrumental in her efforts to act as a the protective custodian of that reputation. The pair now lived a charmed life at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, the large villa by Mougins which would provide his home for the rest of his life, and it is this life which is reflected in the gentle lyricism of Tête de femme (Jacqueline).

Tête de femme (Jacqueline) is the larger of two portraits of Jacqueline that Picasso created on 24 May 1963; the other shows her in a form of three-quarter profile, whereas this work features an almost confrontational frontality that hints at the closeness between the artist and his subject. Jacqueline is gazing out from the canvas at the artist, and by extension the viewer, engaging us directly. Picasso had often focussed on Jacqueline's features in profile, in part because of her resemblance to the right-hand figure in Eugène Delacroix's famous painting, Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement of 1834, which is in the Louvre, Paris. Picasso had been obsessed with this picture, and had painted numerous homages and adaptations of it.

Picasso's relationship with Delacroix was one facet of a more general trend that characterised a great deal of his output during the post-War era. During this time, Picasso, an undisputed giant of twentieth-century art who had changed the entire lay of the land in his chosen disciplines, was looking to his predecessors rather than his contemporaries, in part for inspiration and in part in the role of challenger. He was both saluting his older like-minded travellers on the road of innovation such as Rembrandt, Velasquez and Ingres, and was simultaneously knocking at the pedestals upon which they had been elevated. Thus, during what John Richardson referred to as l'époque Jacqueline, Picasso's paintings were filled with strange muses and musketeers, characters with one foot in the artist's own domestic life and another in the past of both fact and fiction, often painted with what bordered on violence.

Linking her to the semi-self-portrait musketeers, Jacqueline was in part a source of inspiration to Picasso as the romantic interest in the narrative of his own life. That sense of romance is all the more central to Tête de femme (Jacqueline) because of Picasso's decision, which was evident in several works from this period, to present her in this picture in a fairly naturalistic manner, instead of disrupting the features he had found so fascinating by presenting them through his post-Cubist lens. Over the previous years, Picasso had often exaggerated Jacqueline's features in his paintings, for instance showing her with a large proboscis in place of a nose; these incarnations would become all the more recognised because of the sculptures that he also created of her, using a similar visual lexicon in order to assemble her various features. Even the other painting created on 24 May 1963 features a more brutalised treatment of her facial features. The three-quarter profile in that work has been rendered with deliberately expressionistic brushstrokes that accentuate areas of harsh geometrical exaggeration, in stark contrast to the supine curves of shoulders, neck and head in Tête de femme (Jacqueline). Here, against a backdrop that is partially filled with her lush dark hair, Picasso's wife is shown with her face a crisp oval, recalling his highly-realistic drawings of her, not least from the early days of their relationship.

Some traces of Picasso's idiosyncratic stylisations and codifications remain in Tête de femme (Jacqueline), for instance in the exaggerated neck and in the eyes, one of which appears to straddle the visual language of Picasso's earlier Cubism and the ancient amulets known as the Eye of Horus, coming from Ancient Egypt. The neck itself may relate to the Fayum portraits which decorated mummies in Egypt during the Roman period of its history, so many of which are in museum collections throughout the world, not least the Louvre; indeed, the tiara in Picasso's picture introduces that notion of the classical world.

Those early Coptic portraits are often surprisingly painterly considering the fact that they date from almost two millennia ago, with the facial features captured in almost caked, thick brushstrokes which are recalled by the impasto around the face in Tête de femme (Jacqueline). This brushwork may show Picasso looking back to his ancient predecessors, but it also reveals painter with his finger still on the pulse of modern developments in the artistic avant garde. Picasso's paintings of the 1960s often feature frenzied brushwork, thick and textured and thrown all the more into relief by the thinner paint in other parts of the canvas and indeed his bold decision to leave other areas completely in reserve, allowing the primed canvas to peek through, as is the case in the lower area of Tête de femme (Jacqueline) and in part of the neck. Invoking the spirit of Informel, Picasso retains a contemporary validity in this portrait while managing to allow it to express his subject's beauty.

At the same time, this maelstrom of brushstrokes in the area of Jacqueline's face speaks of a frenzied activity on the part of the painter, despite his years. Picasso's romantic and painterly depictions of his wife were a form of proof of life, an act of defiance against the encroaching mortality of which he was so famously in denial; the act of creating two paintings of Jacqueline on the same day emphasises this. Picasso's formidable energy reveals an artist still able to grab life by the horns, displaying a formidable vitality while perhaps indulging in some form of possession through the oils and brushes that had been such prosthetic extensions since his youth as a childhood prodigy. Again showing an artist in touch with contemporary developments, Picasso introduces this almost abstract quality to the brushwork of the face, and in this way invokes his own highly personal incarnation of the existentialism that had coloured intellectual and artistic circles in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

John Richardson has apparently said that one of Picasso's reasons for portraying Jacqueline with such a long, swan-like neck in his paintings, as was the case both in the years before and after this picture, was a humorous and playful reaction to the shortness of her neck in reality. At the same time, he may also have been casting an eye towards one of his former contemporaries in the Paris of the first quarter of the century, Amedeo Modigliani. The exaggerated neck in Tête de femme (Jacqueline) certainly recalls Modigliani's paintings, not least Jeune fille brune, assise. That picture, which was formerly in Picasso's own collection and is now in the Musée Picasso, Paris, shows the graceful neck that was so characteristic in Modigliani's portraits; yet, as was the case in his reprisals of the legacies of Rembrandt, Ingres, Velasquez and others, he has used his incredible visual erudition as the basis for a more personal, subjective adventure in his oils, meaning that in Tête de femme (Jacqueline) the overall result is distinctly Picasso's own

Visitors look at Kees van Dongen's ''Gitane'' painting at Christie's auction house in London. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

The second highest price on the night was 7.1 million pounds paid for Dutch artist Kees van Dongen's "La Gitane" versus a pre-sale estimate of 5.5-7.5 million pounds.

Russian painter Natalia Goncharova's "Espagnole", offered at auction for the first time, was sold for 6.4 million pounds, above the high estimate of six million.

Christie's also held a surreal art sale on Tuesday which raised around 10.1 million pounds, within expectations of 8.2-11.7 million.

Rival auction house Sotheby's holds its impressionist and modern art sale in London on Wednesday. (Reporting by Mike Collett-White).

Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) La gitane, signed 'van Dongen.' (lower right), oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 32 in. (100.2 x 81.2 cm.). Painted circa 1910-1911. Sold £7,097,250 ($11,284,628). Photo: Christie's Images Ltd., 2010

Provenance: M. Midy, by whom acquired directly from the artist, and thence by descent.
Galerie Cazeau-de la Béraudière, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998.

Literature: M. Vallès-Bled, 'Rotterdam, Paris et le rêve d'Orient', in exh. cat., Van Dongen, du nord et du sud, Musée Fleury, Lodève, 2004, p. 19.

Exhibited: Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Van Dongen, January - June 2002, no. 43 (illustrated p. 87).
Rotterdam, Kunsthal, Kees van Dongen, Elegant Lines: lithos, pochoirs and paintings, December 2002 - May 2003.
Monaco, Nouveau Musée National, Van Dongen, June - September 2008, no. 162 (illustrated p. 231); this exhibition later travelled to Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, January - April 2009 and Barcelona, Museu Picasso, June - September 2009.
Den Haag, Gemeentemuseum, Meer dan kleur, fauvisme en expressionisme More than colour, Fauvism and Expressionism, April - October 2009 (illustrated p. 14).

Notes: To be included in the forthcoming Kees van Dongen catalogue critique being prepared by Jacques Chalom Des Cordes under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.

This work has been requested for the forthcoming Kees van Dongen exhibition to be held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, from September 2010 to January 2011.

Painted in 1910-11, La gitane dates from one of the most important periods of Kees Van Dongen's career. This was a time in which he was finally gaining a proper living through his painting, having signed a contract with Bernheim-Jeune and moved into a new studio space. This financial security had granted him the means to go on a tour of several countries in 1910: having headed North to visit his relatives in his native Holland, he then turned South, visiting initially Italy, then Spain and North Africa. The trip marked an incredible epiphany for the artist, who was suddenly exposed to the real-life prototypes of the colours, bright light and exoticism which he had to exaggerate or even imagine in his Parisian studio. This would result in a vintage window within Van Dongen's career, when he painted masterpiece after masterpiece, many of which now grace the walls of museums world-wide.

The degree to which Van Dongen was struck by his new surrounding is clearly evident both in the sensual face and defiant expression of the titular woman in La gitane and of the colours: the red of her shawl is incandescent, a blazing Fauve banner, yet the rest of the canvas is marked by a subtlety and restraint that at once heightens its effect and also reveals Van Dongen painting with a degree of finesse which he had avoided since the turn of the century. Here, at last, he had found a means of combining some of the energy and passion of Fauvism with a more modulated means of pictorial expression.

In this picture, that union is perhaps most evident in the deliberate contrasts Van Dongen has introduced, be it between the ardent red of the shawl and the cool blue of the background, or the textural differecne between the lightly-worked facial features, which reveal Van Dongen's skills as a portraitist, and the assured, playful, deliberately loose manner in which he has rendered the patterns on the material of the Gitane's skirt and blouse. These teeter on the brink of abstraction, and conspire to permit Van Dongen to deploy a range of techniques and textures across the expanse of the canvas, not least in the sheer red, vigorious brushstrokes with which he has captured the dangling fringe of the shawl. Van Dongen has carefully assembled this composition, adding small flourishes such as the ornament in the woman's hair which reveal the lessons of his Fauve period still being put to use; it is precisely this use of colour, of the background and the red, which pushes the beautifully-observed skin tones all the more to the fore.

The light of the South had been a lure to several of the artists associated with Fauvism, not least Matisse and Derain, who had headed to Collioure. Like Matisse, Van Dongen had been an essentially Northern European, used to the flat expanses of the Netherlands and the less intense light. Spain was, then, a revelation, and Van Dongen returned from his trip there and to North Africa with a small group of canvases as well as a large number of sketchbooks and other drawings. These, he used as the basis, on his return to his Paris studio, for a group of pictures depicting the Spanish and North African motifs to which he had been exposed during his travels, many of which would be shown in an exhibition enititled Hollande, Italie, Espagne, Maroc.

This new experience of the light and colours of the South both reinvigorated his Fauve idiom and anchored it in reality. This is especially true of the face in Gitane, to which Van Dongen has applied an incredible amount of concentration and realism, hinting at the artist's own fascination with his model. Truly, looking at this painting, we can see the truth of his declaration that, 'I love anything that glitters, precious stones that sparkle, fabrics that shimmer, beautiful women who arouse carnal desire... painting lets me possess all this most fully' (Van Dongen, quoted in M. Giry, Fauvism, Frisbourg, 1981, pp. 224-6).

Van Dongen's love affair with the South, and in particular with the exotic, has already begun with his exposure to the demimonde in Paris. Living in Montmartre, Van Dongen had become fascinated by the dancers, actresses, cabarets and even prostitutes of the area, and immersed himself in a heady world of sensuality there. At the time, the cabarets and other shows often shared his fascination with the exotic, as is clear from the Orientalist slant evident in many of his pictures from the first decade of the Twentieth Century. However, as was the case with so many of Matisses's Odalisques in the coming decades, the exoticism was often essentially a confection: Van Dongen's studio was a stage, a set, and was managed with props and costumes. Arriving in Spain, he was suddenly exposed to the actual reality, and began to capture the figures, expressions and exotic clothing of these true life characters. This would continue throughout his tour, for instance when painting the Ouled Naïl dancer from Tunisia, as well as some of the other 'gitanes' of Spain. To Van Dongen, these women obviously, and effortlessly, shared some of the raw sensuality and eroticism that was so perfectly distilled in the dancers and actresses with whom he was already so familiar in Paris.

Van Dongen's fascination with Spain clearly continued following his return to Paris, and was evident not only in the paintings that he now completed following his sketches from his travels, but also in other aspects of his life. For instance, the Spanish shawl of his celebrated painting El Mantón, Andalucía, painted in the same period and clearly related to this picture, was in his own collection. Indeed, his wife Guus was photographed wearing it, the blurring of the image hinting that she was herself partaking in a Spanish dance of some form.
By the time of his journey Van Dongen had moved out of the Bateau-Lavoir, the infamous artists' residence in Montmartre where he had been resident for several years; however, one of the great friendships that he had made there remained crucial to the painter, and perhaps helped to guide him during his trip. For it was there that the Dutch artist had become friends with a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. The two had painted and exhibited alongside each other, and had had a mutual model in the form of Fernande Olivier. It seems only logical to assume, then, that Van Dongen would have been highly aware of his friend's work while he travelled, and even more so on his return to Paris. Looking at Gitane, then, one wonders if there is some degree to which this is the Fauve riposte to Picasso's early works from the late Nineteenth Century, exploiting the Spanish themes then in such demand, or even to pictures such as his portrait of Benedetta Canals. Perhaps hinting at some sense of rivalry between these great painters while possibly looking even to Goya and other artists, in Gitane Van Dongen has added his own inimitable perspective to the entire canon depictions of Spain.

Natalia Gontcharova (1881-1962) Espagnole, signed 'N. Gontcharova' (upper right) oil on canvas, 51¼ x 32 in. (130.3 x 81.3 cm.). Painted circa 1916. Sold for £6,425,250 ($10,216,148). Photo: Christie's Images Ltd., 2010

Provenance: The artist's estate.
Galerie Arditti, Paris.
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (no. 3264), by whom acquired from the above in 1962.
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne, by whom acquired from the above in 1969.
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, by 1971.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the early 1980s.

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie d'Art le Cadran, Espagnoles - Magnolia, 1939 (illustrated).
Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Avantgarde Osteuropa 1910-1930, October - November 1967, no. 24 (illustrated p. 49, as 'unsigned', dated 'circa 1914').
Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Russische Künstler aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, October - November 1968, no. 28 (illustrated).
Ithaca, New York, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Russian Art of the Revolution, June - July 1971, no. 9 (titled 'Colorful Construction', dated '1914'); this exhibition later travelled to Brooklyn, Museum of Art.
New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, Russian avant-garde, 1908-1922, October - December 1971, no. 33 (dated '1914').

Notes: 'Time should be divided over a long period in such a way that there should be enough for painting and work for the theatre - these are, of course, inseparable, but painting is an inner necessity for theatrical work, and not vice-versa' (Natalia Gontcharova, quoted in Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Designs for the Theatre: Larionov and Goncharova, exh. cat., London, 1961, unpaginated).


An outstanding fusion of Gontcharova's avant-garde art and her much celebrated work for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes and the Paris stage, Espagnole is a rare and spectacular painting that she made in Europe during the First World War. An essentially abstract combination of Cubo-Futurist form and structure with the details and patterns of the costume of a Spanish dancer, it is one of a groundbreaking series of works that merged the two great disciplines for which Gontcharova is best known - painting and theatre design - into a unique expression of both.

Espagnole derives from the period when the outbreak of the First World War in Europe led to a dramatic shift in the direction of Gontcharova's artistic career and ultimately to her leaving Russia to settle permanently in Paris. In 1914, after her husband Michail Larionov had been invalided out of the Russian army, Gontcharova - as the then leading avant-garde artist in Russia - was invited by Sergei Diaghilev to design the sets and costumes for his production in Paris of Coq D'Or. This Rimsky-Korsakov opera took the form of a ballet with chorus, which employed the décor as an integral part of the action. The singers were grouped in pyramidal masses on either side of the stage, and the whole scene was rendered in the festive reds and yellows of Russian icon and folk art.

Having already experimented in blending Western avant-garde style with Eastern Folk art in her paintings, Gontcharova here easily combined Cubist simplification with the rich ornament of traditional craftsmanship, in a way that came to completely change the sumptuous naturalism of all Diaghilev's previous productions, and established a radical new technique that later came to be known as theatrical Constructivism. Gontcharova's outstanding ability to seamlessly fuse the dynamic language of her Cubo-Futurist paintings with the colours, forms, motifs and traditions of Folk art and dance into a dramatic whole, not only established her immediately as a stage designer of genius, but also led to an important sequence of further commissions and a long association with the Ballets Russes. It also prompted Diaghilev to enter into important collaborations with other leading avant-garde artists of the day. Guillaume Apollinaire, who became a friend and champion of Gontcharova at this time, wrote of her work that she 'commands an aesthetic in which the great and intellectually satisfying truths of today's scientific art are combined with the appealing subtleties of Oriental art. To this, Mme. Gontcharova has added, first, the modern harshness contributed by Marinetti's metallic futurism and, second, the refined light of rayism, which is the purest and newest expression of contemporary Russian culture' (quoted in L. Breuing (ed.), Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918, Boston, 1972, p. 413).


Espagnole is one of extremely few paintings that Gontcharova made in the immediate aftermath of her first successful foray into the theatre, he and at a time when she was fully absorbed in this new development in her career. Indeed, with its fusion of the near-abstract Rayonist and Cubo-Futurist form that had distinguished her paintings in Russia, and in its adoption of the theme of a Spanish Dancer - one that she would develop to the point of obsession in the early 1920s - it is a work that appears to relate directly to her work for the next two Ballet Russes productions: España and Triana.

España and Triana were two Spanish-themed ballets that, although never performed, were to have a major impact on the development of Gontcharova's art. Having moved to Switzerland in 1915 and later working in both Italy and France before moving permanently to Paris, Gontcharova spent much of this period working on the costumes and sets for these Spanish-themed ballets. In particular, after a visit to Spain in 1916, she became so captivated by the costumes and mantillas of the Spanish dancers she had seen there that this subject was to dominate much of her later painting as well as her ballet design. The combination of her work on España in particular - a ballet consisting of a series of Spanish dances based around Ravel's music - and her enduring fascination with the costumes of the women she had seen in Spain, ultimately led, throughout the 1920s and early '30s to an extended series of paintings on the theme of the Spanish dancer. This series grew out of the designs and the very small number of paintings and graphic studies on the theme of the Spanish dancers that Gontcharova was able to make at this time. 'I wanted to go to the East,' she later lamented, recalling how little time she had to paint at this time.

One of the largest, most ambitious, and fully resolved of the few paintings Gontcharova ever painted, Espagnole is a highly important painting, that appears to have grown from an idea the artist had originally expressed in the form of a preparatory design for a Spanish costume relating to one of these unperformed Spanish productions. The gouache design, dated by Gontcharova as 1914, but most probably painted circa 1916, was first published under the title Costume Espagnol in the portfolio L'Art Décoratif Théàtral Moderne, published by Larionov and Gontcharova in Paris in 1919. It is thought to relate to a costume idea Gontcharova had had for the ballet España and was to have been worn by the ballerina Catherine Devilliers.

Combining a sense of abstract form, dynamic movement, radiant colour and rich decorative pattern, this large and intensely-worked oil painting, effectively translates Gontcharova's idea for a pochoir into a dramatic, dynamic and essentially abstract construction. An angular layering of colourful form, floral pattern and decorative motif anchored into a collage-like compilation of form - (and actually rendered by Gontcharova in an extraordinary collage version around the same time) - this work captures the full dynamism, energy and colour of a costumed dancer in motion in wholly abstract and decorative terms. An extension in this respect of an artist like Gino Severini's series of studies of the dancer as a Futurist expression of line, motion and colour, Gontcharova's painting incorporates all the exoticism, mystery of the folk roots of traditional Spanish dance into this spectacular painterly construction. Seeming to fold off the canvas plane in the exuberance with which each form interconnects and relates to the other, a three-dimensional sense of arabesque movement that recalls the patterns of the dance is also suggested by the strong conjunction of criss-crossing lines and angles throughout the composition. Collectively all these elements combine to form a complex and condensed kaleidoscope of line, form, colour, pattern and movement that miraculously seems to conjure a powerful sense of all the richness, passion and decorative splendour of a traditional Spanish dance.

This was indeed the impression that these early Spanish-themed works generated on all who saw them in Paris at this time. As S. Romoff humourously recalled, 'While looking at the Espagnoles that Mme Gontcharova has created to accompany Ravel's music, someone who refuses to comprehend Cubism, recently said to me, in a tone of irony, But these are cathedrals my dear!...But, indeed, from the stage these works could only but have given us the impression of cathedrals in motion, cathedrals through which one would see all of Spain, kneeling in mystical faith, an entire population drunk on sunshine and colour' ('Le Cubisme dans l'Art theatral', L'Art , Paris, May 1919, p. 11).