Pablo Picasso

Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris

Jacques Helft, Paris (acquired from the above circa 1919)

Stephen Hahn Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above on June 1970

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 3, Paris, 1949,  no. 253, illustrated pl. 88

The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture.  From Cubism to Neoclassicism, 1917-1919, San Francisco, 1995, no. 19-038, illustrated p. 183

Very good condition. Graphite on wove paper. The sheet is hinged to the mat and is stable, with a few expertly repaired tears to the top center, lower right and left edges and two tiny notches at the right center. On the verso, the tears at the lower left and right bear slight traces of old support tape residue and are currently reinforced with Japanese tissue. There are also two nearly imperceptible marks of foxing on the lower right and right center. The color of the sheet and the composition itself are in excellent condition, and the graphite is firmly and precisely applied.
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The present drawing, created during what is known as the artist's neo-Classical period, evidences Picasso's life-long admiration of the art of Paul Cézanne.  This picture is closely modeled after Cézanne's legendary Le Grand baigneur, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which Picasso had no doubt seen either when it was exhibited in Paris in 1910 or when it was in the possession of his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who also handled the present work.  Although Picasso's indebtedness to the example of Cézanne is clear, this drawing of 1919 exemplifies the transformation that had occurred in his style as he abandoned the Cubist techniques that had dominated his art in the years before the war.

Those works which Picasso produced immediately after the Great War are notable for their extreme precision, which was directly related to the "Call to Order" that encouraged the French avant-garde to draw inspiration from their Latinate ancestry and the examples of traditional French masters like Ingres and Poussin.  Picasso, as usual, was a pioneer in this new movement, confidently reinterpreting a recognizable Greco-Roman clarity of form into his drawings and paintings of the era, including the present work.