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Lot Essay
Embellished with wax crayons in a rainbow of hues, this drawing depicting two female nudes—joined by a black cat and tiny kitten at lower right—is one of the more elaborately rendered pages that Pablo Picasso signed and detached from a spiral-bound sketchbook whose front cover he inscribed “17.6.62” (Glimcher, no. 165). The double-dating at upper left on the sheet denotes the two-step process by which Picasso completed this image. First employing a graphite pencil, the artist set down the contours and hatching of the figures and creatures in a single session on 20 July. He returned to the drawing on the 25th to enhance the imagery with color—of the sixteen studies of two nudes that he completed between 16 and 27 July (Zervos, vol. 20, nos. 327-342), he further treated only six in this manner.
The first two drawings in Sketchbook no. 165 are studies Picasso drew after Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, which had been his primary project of interpretive appropriation since August 1959, numbering in the end more than 175 paintings and drawings. Pencil studies of lovers in bed comprise the next eighteen pages, leading to the series of Deux nus, with Picasso’s wife Jacqueline as his subject, which may be likened to Manet’s artists’ models at their ease—the presence of the cats perhaps alludes to the feline atop the bed in Manet’s Olympia. Picasso subsequently returned to the Déjeuner theme in another eight studies, bringing this lengthy enterprise to a conclusion in four drawings dated 1 and 2 August 1962, a finale which Picasso’s men and women celebrate by indulging in an orgy.
Following a series of paintings based on Poussin’s L’enlèvement des sabines in October 1962, a campaign Picasso claimed had left him “spent,” he declared to Hélène Parmelin that he was “embarking upon an incredible adventure…to rediscover painting…in the form of the natural and not the form of art—the grass as grass, the nude as nude” (quoted in Picasso: The Artist and Model, New York, 1965, pp. 9 and 10). The artist and model became his fundamental theme, later joined by the mosqueteros and their ilk—Picasso had settled on his subjects for the final decade of his long career.
The first two drawings in Sketchbook no. 165 are studies Picasso drew after Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, which had been his primary project of interpretive appropriation since August 1959, numbering in the end more than 175 paintings and drawings. Pencil studies of lovers in bed comprise the next eighteen pages, leading to the series of Deux nus, with Picasso’s wife Jacqueline as his subject, which may be likened to Manet’s artists’ models at their ease—the presence of the cats perhaps alludes to the feline atop the bed in Manet’s Olympia. Picasso subsequently returned to the Déjeuner theme in another eight studies, bringing this lengthy enterprise to a conclusion in four drawings dated 1 and 2 August 1962, a finale which Picasso’s men and women celebrate by indulging in an orgy.
Following a series of paintings based on Poussin’s L’enlèvement des sabines in October 1962, a campaign Picasso claimed had left him “spent,” he declared to Hélène Parmelin that he was “embarking upon an incredible adventure…to rediscover painting…in the form of the natural and not the form of art—the grass as grass, the nude as nude” (quoted in Picasso: The Artist and Model, New York, 1965, pp. 9 and 10). The artist and model became his fundamental theme, later joined by the mosqueteros and their ilk—Picasso had settled on his subjects for the final decade of his long career.