Femme nue couchée is one of Picasso’s most monumental and uninhibited portrayals of his muse Marie-Thérèse Walter. A crowning achievement of painterly verve, energy and manipulation of the human form, the present work succinctly synthesizes the artist’s groundbreaking achievements of the late 1920s and early 1930s into one colorful, dynamic canvas. Here, in the seclusion of his new country home in Boisgeloup, the nude figure of Marie-Thérèse reclines in a highly abstracted space, her biomorphic figure imbued with fertility, sexuality and grace. Never before offered at auction, Femme nue couchée is a tour de force of Picasso’s famed 1932 artistic production.

The first dedicated series of paintings depicting Marie-Thérèse was executed in late December 1931 and January 1932 in anticipation of the major retrospective that Picasso was planning that coming June. It was during these preceding months that he first cast his artistic spotlight on the voluptuous blonde. Up until this point he had only made reference to his extramarital affair with Marie-Thérèse in code, sometimes embedding her symbolically in a composition or rendering her unmistakable profile as a feature of the background. But by the end of 1931, Picasso could no longer repress the creative impulse that his lover inspired, especially as his marriage grew increasingly unbearable. John Richardson explains that while Olga organized large holiday parties that December in an attempt to demonstrate family unity, Picasso was involved in an artistic blood-letting, painting violent or murderous depictions of his wife. The exercise was a catharsis, Richardson claims, that better enabled him to focus on a “languorous, loving painting of a lilac-skinned Marie-Thérèse” (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume III, The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, New York, 2007, p. 466). From December of 1931 through 1932, Picasso turned his obsessive eye towards Marie-Thérèse, creating some of the most hypnotic and alluring images of his career. These thirty paintings of Marie-Thérèse, each measuring over a meter, are as pivotal in Picasso’s work as his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and herald the completely new style that would define his paintings going forward (see below).

_{All Pablo Picasso Artworks: © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York}

Picasso met Marie-Thérèse in 1927; spying her in the streets of Paris, the artist approached her. “I knew nothing—either of life or of Picasso... I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together’” (Marie-Thérèse quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women (exhibition catalogue), 1994, p. 143). The summer of 1927, and the following one, were spent at the beach in Cannes and Dinard respectively. These periods were particularly productive for Picasso as the clandestine presence of the young Marie-Thérèse in Picasso’s life added an erotic frisson to seaside activities and a counterpoint to his deteriorating relationship with his wife Olga.

It was during the summer of 1928 in Dinard that Picasso would break down human form to its barest essentials, an amalgamation of shapes which echoed the curves and bones of the human body (see figs. 1 and 2). “The female figures that populate these drawings and oil paintings are depicted in a kind of short-hand, particular emphasis being given to the erogenous parts of the body. We see them engaged in typical beach activities—playing ball, opening a bathing hut or just sprawling on a towel. The background is frequently defined by no more than a few rocky formations or horizontal lines, against which these monstrous creatures become increasingly expansive and libertine. Picasso’s exceptionally flat, almost silhouette like treatment of the figures and objects in these pictures is especially remarkable and seems to anticipate his folded sculptures—or rather his paintings of his folded sculptures—of the fifties and early sixties… The dissociation and deformation of moving bodies these pictures depict is more expressive, more violent, and above all, more ‘significant’ than the classicistic beach paintings, even though in principle they, they are derived from the same observed motif” (J. Richardson in Exh. Cat., New York, William Beadleston Gallery, Through the Eye of Picasso 1928-1934, 1985, pp. 73-74).

In June 1930, after some time covertly shuffling back and forth from an apartment he had arranged for Marie-Thérèse and his official family residence in Paris, Picasso acquired the Château de Boisgeloup. Seventy kilometers from the French capital, the château became a refuge for the artist and his muse. Its stables were converted into a sculpture studio, where Picasso increasingly devoted his time and creative energy to sculpture, including a number of plaster busts and reclining nude portraits of Marie-Thérèse (see figs. 3 and 4).

The influence of this medium is visible in the present work in the monumental sculptural force with which the female body is portrayed. At the same time, the psychological state of the sleeping woman resonates in the soft modeling of the figure, creating an atmosphere of reverie and carefree abandon. Seeking to convey his erotic desire, Picasso generates morphological permutations and distortions of the female anatomy. Abandoning any attempt at naturalism, he creates a figure composed of biomorphic forms, a technique that developed from his earlier, Surrealist works. While seemingly divorced from any particular setting—whether that of the wooded landscape around the château or in a more constructed interior studio space—a directly related sketch on a scrap of paper shows a figure in a nearly identical pose below an umbrella and in front of a beach hut, a clear reference to the delights of the summer memories he had established with Marie-Thérèse (see fig. 5). Two days after the present work was painted another monumental, serpentine vision of his muse fully reclined appeared. Set in an interior, it is completed by (what some critics have referred to as) a sexually charged still life of fruit at bottom right (see fig. 6).

In Elizabeth’s Cowling’s analysis of the present work she points to it and the April 4th painting as a pair: “From an inscription on the back we know that this [the present work] was painted at Boisgeloup on 2 April 1932. Another canvas of the same size with a similar composition was painted two days later, but has an indoor, harem-like setting and is richly colored and highly decorative (MP 142). The canvas exhibited here is, by contrast, extremely austere, and is like a painting of a stone or plaster sculpture. Picasso was fascinated by the intrinsic differences between the two art forms that he was practicing at Boisgeloup, and would often use painting, drawing and printmaking in order to meditate upon those differences. These two pictures were surely conceived of as a pair—the one being about sculpture, the other about painting. The ’sculpture’ in our painting is related to the loose-limbed ‘Reclining Bather’ on a low plinth which Picasso had modeled in plaster in 1931 (S. 109) but she is both more pneumatic and more gravity defying” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, 1994, p. 272; see fig. 3).

Just a year before Picasso painted Femme nue couchée, a large-scale retrospective of Henri Matisse’s works was staged in Paris at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1931. Never one to back down from perceived competition, some of Picasso’s large-scale reclining nudes and women in the studio of 1932 can be seen as a direct challenge to Matisse’s dominance in the realm of figure painting. Writing about Picasso’s 1932 exhibition in Paris and Zurich, Michael Fitzgerald opines: “Picasso’s focus on his latest work and, particularly, the suite of paintings he made from December 1931 through April 1932, created the impact of a ‘master’—both of the past and of the present. Emphasizing painting over his engagement with printmaking, drawing and sculpture…, the gathering at Petit showcased his dominance of the grand tradition of figure painting, a mode that enabled him to answer Matisse and slip past him in a dialogue with previous masters. In this cavalcade of great canvases, aesthetics seemed paramount, and references to other types of experience, especially contemporary life, appeared limited to sensual pleasures” (Exh. Cat. Zurich, Kunsthuas, Picasso. His First Museum Exhibition 1932, 2010-11, p. 133). Paintings such as Femme nue couchée and Nu couché are far more abstracted than works by Matisse such as Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, Matisse’s sumptuous reclining figure in the studio that resided for years in the Rockefeller collection and was included in Matisse’s 1931 retrospective at Georges Petit (see fig. 7).

While Picasso and Matisse diverged in their treatment of the female figure, the heritage for both of them is clear in the great tradition of reclining nudes from Goya to Ingres, Ingres to Manet. Almost from the moment he arrived in Paris as a young man, Picasso toured the museums and galleries. He could have hardly failed to see Jean-Auguste-Dominique-Ingres works such as Le Bain Turc and La Grande Odalisque, the latter painted by Ingres in 1814 and commissioned by Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat, the Queen of Naples. Ingres’ nude met with disapproval when it was exhibited in the Paris salon of 1819—critics pointed to the anatomical impossibilities of the figure who appeared to have, according to their views, added vertebrae in her overly long, curving back. Despite the initial criticism of this work, which depicts a resplendent member of a Harem, surrounded by and adorned in attributes to identify her as such, this work entered the Musée du Louvre’s collection later in the century. A decade after Manet’s death, in 1893, his Olympia, at the direction of Clemenceau, was moved to the Louvre where it hung opposite Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (see figs 8 and 9). While Manet’s nude wears a ribbon choker and a pair of satin slippers (not to mention her adornments of a flower in her hair, bangle on her arm and delicate earring), Ingres’ Odalisque, barefoot, her hair captured in a sumptuous turban bedecked with jewels holds an ornate peacock feather fan and a pipe, of some variety, rests at the base of her blue satin cushion. Historical precedent would imbue Picasso’s works in the decades that followed, from his final years where he obsessively focused on the Musketeer, to his versions of Las Meninas and Les Femmes d’Alger (see fig. 10).

But in these first months of 1932, his sleeping women were without precedent and engendered enthusiastic responses from even the most taciturn personalities within the art world. Writing to Michel Leiris in March of 1932, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler was, for his personality, practically rhapsodic: “Yes, as you say, painting is only being kept alive by Picasso, but how marvelously. Two days ago, at his place, we saw two paintings he had just done [probably Nude in a Black Armchair and Nude, Green Leaves and Bust]. Two nudes that are perhaps the greatest, most moving things he has produced. ‘It seems as though a satyr who had just killed a woman could have painted that picture,’ I said to him about one of the two. It’s not Cubist, not naturalistic, it’s without any painterly artifice, it’s very alive, very erotic, but with the eroticism of a giant. Picasso has done nothing comparable for many years. ‘I would love to paint like a blind man,’ he’d said a few days before, ‘who pictures an arse by the way it feels.’ That’s it exactly. We came away from it stunned” (reproduced in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Picasso 1932. Love Fame Tragedy, 2018, pp. 77 & 79).

Kahnweiler’s words could equally apply to the sensuous, sinuous Femme nue couchée. Here Marie-Thérèse’s limbs cradle her sleeping head, extended back in a pose of surrender and vulnerability. In the present work the fingers disappear, a process begun in Femme nue, feuilles et buste, and further developed in the following works Nu au fauteuil noir and Le Miroir (see figs. 11-13). What further distinguishes the present work from these precedents is a freedom of brushwork, paint application and palette. Without the concerns of a fixed setting—no curtains to contend with, no mirrors to reflect in—Picasso’s exuberance for his muse is unbounded as he mixes and dives between whites, blues, reds, greens and blacks. Hints of vermilion pulse along the figure’s right arm and a patch of bright green dapples her knee. A palpable energy pulses from this canvas and sets it apart as one of the finest canvases of Picasso’s 1932 production.

Femme nue couchée was first publicly reproduced in 1936. It was included in Christian Zervos’s special edition of Cahiers d’Art dedicated to Picasso’s work from 1930-35. In this issue Picasso’s artwork was accompanied by texts from a variety of the most famed Surrealists of the day including André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Georges Hugnet, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray. It held pride of place, reproduced across the full width of a page above text written by Man Ray (see fig. 14). Man Ray’s text—a free-association poetic lexicon of Picasso’s work—darts and bobs around Femme nue couchée. Indeed it appears to circumscribe Picasso’s entire corpus of the early 1930s, pointing to the figure of Venus dominating the language of the painter. Quite literally this can be read as the figure of Marie-Thérèse suffusing all of Picasso’s work. This issue of Cahier d’Art also included the first publication of Picasso’s poetry, which he had dedicated himself to for much of 1935.

While Marie-Thérèse would continue to inhabit Picasso's work for much of the 1930s—though in the later part of this decade his new relationship with Dora Maar would push Marie-Thérèse from primacy of place—this unique moment of 1932 would never again be replicated in Picasso's work. In a year without parallel, Femme nue couchée stands out in its form, scale and painterly verve. Held in the artist's collection until his death in 1973, the present work remained with his heirs until 2008 when it entered the collection of the current owner. It has been widely exhibited in nearly every important recent exhibition dedicated to Picasso's work from this period and remains as enigmatic and impactful as it did when it was first created.