Unveiling Pablo Gargallo's Later Works

Alice Prin was very popular and a muse and model for various artists, such as Mace Ray. This famous Parisian contemporary never posed for Gargallo, who nevertheless dedicated one of her most paradigmatic works to her, masterfully executing the mask in sheet metal.

Gargallo made three versions of this sculpture with only minor formal differences, consisting mainly of slight changes in position and almost graphic variations in hair and eyelashes. His play with light makes this sculpture a masterpiece.

His daughter, Pierrette Gargallo, who had been born 10 years earlier, acted as an impromptu model for her father to model the forearms and hands of this figure.

This work is very representative of Gargallo's latest classicist nudes. He drew two preliminary sketches or studies, front and back, which he would later follow fairly closely, except for a slight change in the arms.

The Russian painter Marc Chagall, who lived in Paris, was a friend of Gargallo, who portrayed him with a kind of symbolism: a symbiosis between the painter and Bella Rosenfeld, his wife, represented by the female figure passing through his head.

In this work, Gargallo brings together his most important previous achievements in terms of expressive concepts and plastic language: classical antiquity, classicist figuration, negative modeling, and total emptiness. It summarizes the artistic trajectory of his life.

Free of any anecdotal concession, rigorous in its anatomy, and completely refined in its formal and expressive language, this work is modern in its approach and in the plastic language of its execution. Gargallo drew four preliminary sketches for this sculpture.

Despite the flatness of his limbs and his body, the musician dances with extraordinary grace and shows an incomparable joy of life. The curls are particularly striking. The lyre originally had three strings, but Gargallo decided to delete them. 

To model the female nudes from the last two years of his life, Gargallo relied on a model of Nordic origin. This explains the anatomical features and the body structure that is less sensual, less Mediterranean in short, than in other previous nudes.

This is the sculptor's most emblematic work, which he has been working on for almost 30 years. In it, Gargallo gathers and synthesizes almost all his expressive and conceptual achievements in the field of the representation of volumes, space and light.