Rare first edition of the catalogue for Picasso’s final exhibition at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris, held from 17 January to 18 February 1939 at 21 rue La Boétie. The front wrapper is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph of the exhibition’s centrepiece: La sculpture nègre devant la fenêtre, now known as Buste de Minotaure devant une fenêtre (Private Collection; see Zervos, vol. VIII, p. 360). Painted on 19 April 1937, the work is widely regarded as a precursor to the bull of Guernica, executed only a few weeks later.

An excellent, well-preserved copy.

The plaquette lists the 33 works exhibited, arranged by year of execution- 1936, 1937, and 1938. The verso carries the notice of the next exhibition, “Centenary of Cézanne”, dated 20 February 1939. These two events were followed only by a final show devoted to Georges Braque, before the gallery closed and Paul Rosenberg left France for permanent exile in the United States.

The event met with considerable success, as reported by the American collector and sculptor Meric Callery to Alfred H. Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: 

"R's [Rosenberg] present show of Picasso is surprising in that it is so pretty, colorful and gay. They have had over 600 people per day to see it." Making Modernism, Michael C. FitzGerald, 1996

The adjectives “pretty, colourful and gay” may seem surprising, given both Picasso’s style and the political context of 1939. Indeed, the exhibition - comprising chiefly still lifes painted between 1936 and 1938 in the Tremblay-sur-Mauldre studio - appears, at first sight, to contrast sharply with the tragic contemporary events. From 1937 onwards, the Nazis began confiscating over 20,000 modern artworks to mount the notorious Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition. Circulated throughout Germany’s major cities, it culminated in June 1939 in a large-scale auction to finance the war, preceded by the burning of more than 5,000 paintings in the courtyard of Berlin’s main barracks.

Fully aware of the ongoing tragedy, Paul Rosenberg took measures to save as many works as possible, organising in the same year the first retrospective of Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art, where Guernica was displayed and preserved. In 1940, he took permanent refuge in New York, opening his celebrated gallery on 79th Street, while some 2,000 works he could not take with him were looted by the Nazis.

Belying its seemingly innocuous appearance, the exhibition of “recent works” by the foremost representative of so-called Degenerate Art, held by a Jewish dealer, constituted a genuine act of resistance to the rise of Nazism. Yet it was above all through a single work, prominently displayed in the main salon and reproduced on the catalogue’s front, that Rosenberg and Picasso transformed the still-life exhibition into a profoundly political statement. Later known as Buste du Minotaure devant une fenêtre, this “transitional” work, as noted by the art historian Vérane Tasseau, is highly symbolic:

“The bull does not stand for fascism, but for brutality and darkness Picasso remarked in the autumn of 1944 during an interview with the young painter Jerome Seckler for the American Marxist journal New Masses. Seckler had hoped to elicit from him the assertion that the late 1938 series of still lifes with bull heads was a political statement, in continuity with Guernica."

This first bull’s head in the still-life series gradually evolved over the course of 1938 into a curious zoomorphic human visage. It is nevertheless still titled in the catalogue La sculpture nègre devant la fenêtre. Although this title was not retained in subsequent monographs, it establishes a remarkable link between two major themes in Picasso’s oeuvre: the bull motif and African sculpture.

Valuable and significant catalogue of Picasso’s final exhibition with his dealer “Rosi,” who, more than any other, secured his international reputation and established the painter as the foremost artist of the twentieth century.