Antoni Clavé (Barcelona, 1913 - Saint Tropez,... Lot 36

Antoni Clavé (Barcelona, 1913 - Saint Tropez, 2005)?"Mannequins"?Oil on canvas. Signed. Painted in 1950.?On the back it is signed again and has labels from the Lehmans Gallery in London and from Uniarte Barcelona. 170 x 220 cm. ?At the end of the forties, Clavé began to make scenery and costumes for prestigious ballet productions, such as Los Caprichos for Ballets des Champs-Elysées (Paris, 1946), Carmen for the Paris Roland Petit Ballet company (Paris, 1949), Ballabile for Sadler’s Welles Ballet (London, 1950). He also illustrated high quality books for bibliophiles such as: The Queen of Spades, by Pushkin, Carmen, by Prosper Mérimée in 1946; Candide by Voltaire in 1948; Gargantua by Rabelais in 1950.?He also had successful exhibitions in Galerie Delpierre in Paris in 1946, at the Anglo-French Art Centre in London in 1947, at the Galerie Robert Martin in Oran in 1948, (the year in which he was also awarded the Hallmark prize in New York) in Malmö in 1949 and in Göteborg in 1950. ?And so we arrive at the date in which the important mannequins series began, in which Clavé goes deeper into a particular poetic dimension. This is helped by his palette, which, as Pierre Seghers and Pierre Cabanne say, is “loaded and coloured like a polychromatic stained glass window.” ?The face of the wooden, jointed mannequin, which he had in his workshop, is transformed in these paintings into that of a sweet and melancholy woman, with a lost, inaccessible look. ?Beyond the Picasso reference, it is a key painting which augurs the series of kings and warriors which brought the artist so much fame. ?Contemplating this painting makes us feel immersed in the painter´s workshop, in movement, as if in a ballet which attracts us and hooks us. The scene is presided over by an “almost queen” mannequin, on her throne, topped off by a magnificent hat as a crown. She looks at us directly, enigmatically and suggestively, we find ourselves in a whole world with still life arrangements, women pai