Jeune Femme à la Guitare (Portrait of Mousse Bissière)

Provenance:
La Varenne-Sainte-Hilaire, 18 Dec 1988, no. 107 (ill.)
Drouot Montaigne, Paris, 22 Nov 1989, no. 121 (ill.)
Collection of Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer

Literature:
Isabelle Bissière and Virginie Duval, Bissière catalogue raisonné (Paris: Ides et Calendes, 2001), vol. 2, p. 71, no. 188 (listed with date of 1922).

By 1920, the artistic battles that had marked the first decades of the twentieth century and the swift rise to prominence of modernity had abated. The cultural shock left by the First World War left artists, critics and writers looking for means to reconnect with a more simple past and with longstanding traditions. Artistic currents once recognized for their departure from the juste milieu now sought to look back to a more coherent mode of representation: this was the period of Picasso’s bathers and the abstracted nude allegorical figures of Aristide Maillol. It is in this atmosphere that Roger Bissière developed his particular approach to Cubism. Abandoning the cubist approach that sought to break and dissolve form, the new Cubism sought formal simplicity and harmony based on a logical, classical order. The Portrait of Mousse Bissière is an excellent concretization of the new Cubist principles.

The artist’s wife, Catherine Lucie Lotte, nicknamed Mousse, is posed behind a table with a guitar and clarinet. The planes of her face and arms are modeled into smooth cylinders, while other items in the composition are painted in flat, simple shapes. Her expression is quiet, almost monolithic, and noble, giving a sense of classical serenity. The presence of musical instruments bring to mind the concepts of harmony and rhythm, both ideas explored by the new Cubist theory. Despite the smooth, flattened forms of the painting, Bissiére utilizes shapes of thick impasto, heightening the painterly qualities of the work.