Joven del gato (retrato de Arthur Cravan) (Youth of the Cat [Portrait of Arthur Cravan])

Joven del gato (retrato de Arthur Cravan) (Youth of the Cat [Portrait of Arthur Cravan]) is an early work by Olga Sacharoff. Made in Paris at a time in which the artist had moved beyond her Cubist period — albeit still using the collage technique — it recalls the aesthetic of her friend Amedeo Modigliani, from whom she took the importance of drawing, stretched forms, pupilless eyes and a mode of building volumes which would underpin her subsequent work in the 1920s.

The subject of the portrait, poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, was the brother of Otho Lloyd, whom Sacharoff had met in 1910 and whom she would marry some years later. At the start of the First World War, as with many overseas artists, Olga and Otho left France to settle in Spain, and, after travelling through different places, took up residence in Barcelona, in 1916, in the home of Francis Picabia and his wife. It was there that they formed a community of exiled avant-garde artists, among them Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Albert Gleizes and also Picabia. Upon returning to France at the end of the war, many of these artists maintained ties with Catalonia, to the extent that, years later, Sacharoff would settle permanently in Barcelona.



Raúl Martínez Arranz