Chair and Owl

This important painting was made in the wake of the Second World War, at a time when Pablo Picasso's works were turning from pessimistic to optimistic themes. Although in 1943-44 he painted a number of still lifes with skulls, Picasso moved to Antibes with Françoise Gilot in the summer of 1946 and began a new series in which animals and birds, as well as the ambience of the Mediterranean, marked a new moment of happiness in his work. The photographer Michael Sima had given him a small live owl as a gift-the bird was both the symbol of Antibes and of the goddess Athena-and Picasso proceeded to paint it in a number of works. The AMAM's painting shows the owl perched on a caned and wooden chair.

Chair and Owl was given by Picasso to be sold for the benefit of Benjamin Peret, a French Surrealist poet, who was stranded in Mexico during the war and needed funds to leave. Jacqueline Breton, the wife of André Breton (a French writer and poet best known as the founder of Surrealism), brought it to the United States to be sold, and it was purchased by Enid and Joseph Bissett from the dealer Pierre Matisse in that year.