Three Doves

For Picasso both pigeons and doves were a living reality rather than a symbol. They were a part of his life from childhood. His father was a pigeon fancier and also a painter who specialised in depictions of pigeons and pigeon cotes. A notable example of his work is the oil painting titled Pigeon Cote, which Picasso referred to throughout his life in a hyperbolic manner: ‘A cage with hundreds of pigeons. With thousands and millions of pigeons.’ Picasso depicted this subject in his earliest works and at different times throughout his career.

One of the first birds that he produced was a paper cutout made in Málaga at the early date of 1890. That same year in Málaga he made his first drawing on the subject, a group of pigeons in a pigeon cote, an initial approach to the theme that already includes the motif of one of the birds in an opening of its cote, as in this oil on canvas, Three Doves. Picasso’s juvenile sketchbooks are also filled with pigeons and over time they would become his favourite animal in his bestiary, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. It was at this point that the dove became a world symbol of peace through Picasso’s lithograph made for the World Peace Congress of 1949.

In 1957, in the midst of the taxing process of the creation of the Las Meninas series, the artist painted a series of nine oils of young pigeons. Picasso thus abruptly interrupted the claustrophobic series inspired by Velázquez and immortalised the pigeons that he kept in a dovecote on the top floor of La Californie, with its views of the Bay of Cannes. Three years after that series, Three Doves makes use of a very similar language with a similar geometrised arrangement based on angular forms. The same day that he painted this work, 18 November 1960, Picasso produced a similar oil of horizontal format depicting a pair of doves guarding their nest with blue sky as the background. That work, the Las Meninas series and Three Doves all use the same luminous blue in the background. It is here that one of the differences lies with respect to the artist’s childhood memories; from the closed, detailed, ochre-toned compositions of the father, to the formal, chromatic and above all psychological freedom of the son.

Text: Eduard Vallès, ‘Three Doves’, in Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 352–53.