Waiting (Margot)

In 1901 Picasso made his second trip to Paris, and that same year Pere Mañach, a Catalan dealer established in the capital, engaged the help of art critic Gustave Coquiot to convince gallery owner Ambroise Vollard (one of the most prominent dealers at the turn of the century) to stage a show of the young artist’s works for the summer. The exhibition, which also presented works by Francisco Iturrino, opened in the month of June and displayed sixty-four paintings and several drawings by Picasso, most of them inspired by life in the city. Among other authors, Palau i Fabre and Pierre Daix agree that "Waiting" is in all likelihood the same picture that featured in the show and appeared as work number nine in the catalogue, under the title "The Morphine Addict".
The identity of the young girl portrayed remains a mystery; according to the artist it was a woman he often saw sitting in a café, although he wasn’t especially drawn to her, unlike the characters he encountered by night, which he found fascinating and who motivated him to experiment with the new avant-garde styles he had already come into contact with on his first trip to Paris in 1900. The glassy-eyed, lost gaze of the character suggests the sitter’s addiction to morphine, a theme previously explored by artists such as Rusiñol, Anglada Camarasa and Van Dongen.
In technical terms, Picasso experimented with a style that resembled the Divisionism of Seurat and Signac, and also evoked Van Gogh’s thick impasto compositions of short dynamic brushstrokes occasionally silhouetted in black. As regards the treatment of colour, Picasso anticipated solutions that would subsequently be developed by Fauvism. The use of bright colours – in this case, red – dominates the composition, highlighting both the face and figure and the background. The same technique and use of colour are repeated in "La Nana" (MPB 4.274), painted the same year and also in the museum’s collection.
The exhibition held at Vollard’s gallery enjoyed relative success and almost half the works on display were sold. The exact date on which Mañach sold this oil painting to Catalan collector Lluís Plandiura is unknown, although it has been established that it was purchased by the Board of Museums in 1932 and was added to the museum’s collection in 1963.