Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne

Private Collection, Europe

Private Collection, Switzerland

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve, Pablo Picasso, 1988, no. 62, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1964, vol. 24, Paris, 1971, no. 267, illustrated pl. 101

The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002. no. 64-266, illustrated p. 83

Original canvas. Under ultra-violet light, there is a small group of retouching in the upper center in the pale green section and to the left of the head of the figure. In the lower right corner, a small scratch (1 inch) has been retouched and some retouchings along extreme edges to address some frame abrasion. Overall, this painting is in very good condition.
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In this highly-charged portrayal of a painter and his model, Picasso puts forth one of his most frank depictions of the tension inherent in this much-loved subject.  He sets the scene in a tranquil pastel studio, where two nude figures come face to face in a frenzy of black brush strokes and palette knife scrapes.  The space between them is divided by the artist's easel and canvas, which appears as a slash down the center of the composition.  Despite their physical distance and the barrier of the canvas between them, there is an unmistakable interconnection between these opposing figures.   Picasso emphasizes the yin-yang balance of their bodies, with the protruding knot of the model's hair mirroring the form of the painter's genitalia, and harmonizes the complimentary positions of their limbs.  "The subject of the painter and his model has a very strong erotic potential that Picasso exploited with virtuosity throughout his career," writes the artist's granddaughter Diana Widmaier Picasso. "Entering an artist's studio is like entering a situation of intimacy.  This is where, like him, we become voyeurs" (D. Widmaier Picasso, Picasso, "Art Can Only Be Erotic," Munich, 2005, p. 11).

Le Peintre et son modèle belongs to a series of artists and models that Picasso completed throughout the last ten years of his life.  As it is one of the earliest of this decade-long endeavor, it presents much of the freshness and energy that he brought to this theme, begun immediately upon completion of his harrowing depiction in 1963 of Rape of the Sabines.  Picasso would repeatedly return to this theme in a series of campaigns over the next several years, but, as Gert Schiff proposes, his initial forays into this subject were purely intent as metaphorical exercises:  "For a long time [Picasso] would not dwell upon the anecdotal, or even the erotic potential of the theme.  Nor was he to paint 'autobiography.'  For, contrary to the painters in his pictures, he never used an easel, but laid the canvas flat upon a table, or if it was very big, stretched it out on the floor.  More importantly, he hardly ever worked from live models.  Thus, he used The Artist and His Model as metaphor for the conceptual nature of his art, for the transformation of the thing seen into a sign, for the paradoxical relationship between artistic and pragmatic truth" (G. Schiff, Picasso, The Last Years, 1963-1973 (exhibition catalogue), The Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University, 1983, p. 17).

Whatever Picasso's intention, one cannot escape ascribing obvious biographical associations to these pictures.  As was the case for most of Picasso's pictures from the 1960s and 1970s, the nude model here is clearly inspired by the artist's wife Jacqueline.  Although she did not pose for him per se, Jacqueline was a constant presence in Picasso's studio.  In the last decade of his life she was essentially the gatekeeper of his realm, guarding access to the maestro in his home at Notre-Dame-de-Vie.  Unlike the women that had preceded her in Picasso's life, Jacqueline was enormously deferential to the artist.  She refered to him as her "sun," as if he were the center of her universe, and regarded him with a degree of reverence like no one else in his life.  Picasso became so familiar with Jacqueline that he elementalized her body to the fullest extreme.  Here, for example, she is but a series of broad strokes, essentialized to the very essence of her feminine sex.

"I don't want to paint nudes as nudes," Picasso famously proclaimed.  "All I want is to say breast, say foot or belly.  I don't want to paint nudes from head to foot.  But to get saying...  I need to find the way to do nudes as they are.  You need to give anyone looking at them a way to do the nudes himself with his eyes...  There's a moment... where the breasts put themselves in position only without you needing to draw them" (quoted in D. Widmaier Picasso, op. cit., p. 88).