Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Jeune fille à la corde à sauter
dated '30 Mai 50' (upper left)
pencil on paper
27 x 21cm (10 5/8 x 8 1/4in).
Executed on 30 May 1950
Footnotes:
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Ruiz Picasso.

Provenance
Galerie Mitterrand, Paris.
Anon. sale, Goxe-Belaisch, Enghien-les-Bains, 16 June 1996, lot 184.
Private collection, France (acquired at the above sale).


This drawing is a preparatory sketch for the eponymous sculpture, of which one composed of mixed materials is in the Musée Picasso, and the other in bronze is at the Musée Pompidou. Similarly to the sculpture, the body is designed as a basket and the head as a textured square, as well as staying true to the sculpture's three-dimensional nature, which in the artist's vision was surely of a free-flowing and swirling nature.

As Françoise Gilot observes: 'Pablo had always dreamt of a sculpture that would not touch the ground. He found the solution when he saw a little girl jumping rope. He had a hardware store in Vallauris make a rectangular base from which rose a curved iron tube at about one metre high, in the shape of the rope in the moment when it touches the ground. The end of this 'rope' served as a support for the little girl.' (F. Gilot, C. Lake, Vivre avec Picasso, op. cit., p. 290).
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