Pablo Picasso

Waddington Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1973

Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso: 172 dessins en noir et en couleurs, 1971-73, no. 153, illustrated in color in the catalogue
Madrid, Galería Kreisler, Tribute to Picasso, n.d.

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1971-72, vol. 33, Paris, 1978, no. 489, illustrated pl. 166
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Final Years, 1970-1973, San Francisco, 2004, no.72-229, illustrated p. 339 

Executed on cream wove paper. Adhered to backboard at centre left and right edge and in two places at upper and lower edge of sheet verso. A nailhead sized studio stain at left extreme edge of sheet. Slight undulation to the sheet, particularly to upper right quadrant. A miniscule tear at lower left extreme edge of sheet. The sheet possibly cleaned. The colours bright and fresh. In excellent condition.
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Picasso's obsession with eroticism can be seen as early as 1899 in his oeuvre.  As a young artist, he frequented brothels in Paris and Barcelona for access to models willing to pose in the nude in a sexually-charged environment liberated from the confines he experienced in academic studios.  Picasso's fascination with the nude was a lifelong pursuit that appeared in his art until his death in 1973.  In various periods of his work, Picasso's art was linked to the women who were involved in his personal life.  The women he depicted were always influenced by those women who surrounded him at the time.  The genesis of Nus, executed on August 4^th,1972, was Picasso's wife, muse and lover at that time, Jacqueline Roque. 

The essence of Jacqueline, who never posed as Picasso's model, is ever present in his depictions of women, as in the present work.  Here, he has positioned his model in the lower center part of the composition.  Her sex is explicitly laid out for the viewer to examine.  Picasso has included a quasi self-portrait that is visible to the sitter's left side. The upper-right corner of the sheet exhibits portions of a woman's face in profile, possibly that of Jacqueline.  Her visage and breasts have been covered with washes of gray, blue and black gouache. The only remaining reference to her is her sex which is reminiscent of the Vagina dentata Picasso portrayed in Olga's depictions of her in 1927-29. 

In his discussions of Picasso's late works, David Sylvester links them with his early masterpiece, Demoiselles d'Avignon, both distinguished by the 'raw vitality' which they have as a central underlying theme, "The resemblance of figures in the Demoiselles and in late Picasso to masked tribal dancers is as crucial as their scale in giving them a threatening force (fig. 1).  It is irrelevant whether or not particular faces or bodies are based on particular tribal models; what matters is the air these personages have of coming from a world more primitive, possibly more cannibalistic and certainly more elemental than ours.  Despite the rich assortment of allusions to paintings in the Renaissance tradition, the treatment of space rejects that tradition, the treatment of space rejects that tradition in favor of an earlier one, the flat unperspectival space of, say, medieval Catalan frescoes...  At twenty-five, Picasso's raw vitality was already being enriched by the beginnings of an encyclopedic awareness of art; at ninety, his encyclopedic awareness of art was still being enlivened by a raw vitality (D. Sylvester, Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1952-1972, (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 144).

Fig. 1 Pablo Picasso, Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest