Pablo Picasso (Spanish/1881-1973)
Rug, Masks/Faces Tapis, 1965
In wool
Length: 90 1/2 inches
Width: 71 inches

Designed: Pablo Picasso for Gallerie Lucie Weill, Paris

Edition Marie Cuttoli & Galerie Lucie Weill, France, 1965

Marie Cuttoli (French/1879-1973), a modern fabric art master, was a close friend of Picasso and many artists of her generation, including Braque, Matisse and Man Ray, who photographed her. Through her textile world connections she was associated with the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge; they purchased and moved into her Parisian home. In 2020 the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia held a Cuttoli retrospective. Dr. Albert Barnes had been an admirer of Cuttoli's work.

Bibliography : Charles Slatkin Galleries, Inc., Contemporary French Tapestries, New York, 1965, p. 37 (for an illustration of the design)

Provenance: Estate of Dolores Alton
The first Prell Shampoo model, Dolores Alton (nee Famularo, 1927-2019) was born and raised in New Orleans. As an actress she would live in Chicago, performing at Second City, and was contracted as an ingenue for 20th Century Fox Studios. She studied in Vermont and NY, eventually moving to the Pioneer/Happy Valley in Western Massachusetts. Dolores spent considerable time in France and Italy, for work and culture. As a co-owner of Beaufield Homes (based in Louisiana), she was a conservationist engaged in sustainable housing. As a collector, her interests ranged from archeology to modernism to vernacular art. She would befriend the spiritualist, musician and visual artist Sister Gertrude Morgan of New Orleans' Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward, collecting a significant body of her work. Several Morgan paintings from Alton's collection were shown in the 2005 retrospective exhibition and illustrated in the book: Tools of Her Ministry of Sister Gertrude Morgan.