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Lot Essay
Amidst the swash buckling parade of boldly colored, raffish musketeers that were flowing from Picasso’s studio in the last decades of a life, a series of deftly rendered line drawings also dominated the artist’s late oeuvre. Executed on 20 April 1972, Nu couché is one of a number of vigorous, energetic and erotically charged drawings that the artist created at a prolific pace during this period. With a single, powerfully assured and potent line, Picasso has rendered a searing vision of a reclining figure, her exaggerated features and distorted pose reminiscent of the Surrealist evocations of woman that the artist had created in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Radiating a sense of primal vitality, Nu couché embodies the spirit of defiant creativity and vigorous life force that characterizes Picasso’s work from the final years of his life.
Aged 90, Picasso was, at the time he executed the present work, still working with an unstoppable force and indefatigable zeal. Living with his young wife, Jacqueline Picasso in their large home in the south of France, known as Notre-Dame-de-Vie, the artist was residing in more or less seclusion, rarely travelling and entertaining only intimate groups of close friends when he so desired. As a result, Picasso retreated into a private fantasy world, peopling his canvases, drawings and etchings with fantastical visions of voluptuous nudes both alone and cavorting with handsome musketeers and musicians, as well as the solitary figure of the artist in his studio. Along with his series of etchings that he executed in 1968, Suite 347, it was drawing which served as a vehicle for the artist’s meandering thoughts, desires and his vivid imagination to manifest itself into creative form; he stated, "I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to; basically it’s my way of writing fiction" (J. Richardson, "L’Époque Jacqueline," Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 29).
As Nu couché attests, the dominant subject of these late works is undoubtedly women. The female figure had been the site of some of Picasso’s most iconic and iconoclastic experimentations since the earliest days of his career. Alluring and adored, fearsome or monstrous, dismembered, voluptuous or gaunt, Picasso depicted women like no other artist, constantly exploring the innumerable facets of femininity, plundering the female psyche for artistic inspiration. “Picasso is the painter of woman,” Marie-Laure Bernadac has written, “goddess of antiquity, mother, praying mantis, blown-up balloon, weeper, hysteric, body curled in a ball or sprawled in sleep, pile of available flesh…fruitful mother or courtesan: no painter has ever gone so far unveiling the feminine universe in all the complexity of its real and fantasy life”(M-L. Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model," in ibid., p. 80). Reclining alone or in passionate embraces with men, pictured as frolicking Arcadian nymphs, or bawdy prostitutes trussed in stockings, the female figure appears in myriad guises in this late period of Picasso’s career. Yet what unites these different presentations is eroticism: the female figure is nearly always shown nude, frequently with their legs spread and genitalia exposed. On the same day that he created the present work, Picasso painted two other works on paper that feature the same commanding, expressively rendered reclining nude figure (Zervos, vol. 31, nos. 357-358). Dominating the sheet of paper, her pose and expression are enigmatic: is this figure in distress, about to flail her left arm behind her, or is she simply reclining, her exaggerated, distorted forms part of a strange vision of woman that had imposed itself upon Picasso. These expressive drawings form a diary of eroticism as the artist’s outpouring of creativity continued to flow until his death in 1973.
The unmediated and overt eroticism that characterizes Nu couché and Picasso’s other works of this time is often interpreted as a projection of the artist’s own sexual desires, which were by this time, unable to be fulfilled. The nude is no longer portrayed as a sensual and alluring presentation of femininity but is instead pictured with a raw and physical carnality and explicit eroticism. Like smoking, which the artist had been forced to give up, Picasso could no longer indulge in sexual activity. As he remarked to his friend, the photographer, Brassaï, “Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to offer you a cigarette, even though I know neither of us smokes any longer. Age has forced us to give it up, but the desire remains. It’s the same thing with making love. We don’t do it anymore but the desire is still with us!” (Picasso, quoted in ibid., p. 29). Sex, love and painting had long been intertwined in Picasso’s art, yet, in this last phase of his life, this dialogue came to the fore, with the act of art making becoming a substitute for the act of sex. As John Richardson writes, “The tools of the artist’s trade—his brushes—became surrogates for sexual parts to be used on a canvas that was a surrogate for the model” (ibid., p. 30). Indeed, when the artist was asked about the difference between eroticism and art, he replied unequivocally, “There is no difference” (quoted in ibid., p. 29). The often-crude sexual scenarios that Picasso drew, and his obsession with female genitalia can therefore be regarded as a means for the artist to relive a lost virility and express his irrepressible sexual desire. Yet more than this, by immersing himself in the depiction of this primal human urge, Picasso was reveling in the expression of life itself, harnessing this vitality as a means to defy the inexorable passage of time as he reached his final years.
Aged 90, Picasso was, at the time he executed the present work, still working with an unstoppable force and indefatigable zeal. Living with his young wife, Jacqueline Picasso in their large home in the south of France, known as Notre-Dame-de-Vie, the artist was residing in more or less seclusion, rarely travelling and entertaining only intimate groups of close friends when he so desired. As a result, Picasso retreated into a private fantasy world, peopling his canvases, drawings and etchings with fantastical visions of voluptuous nudes both alone and cavorting with handsome musketeers and musicians, as well as the solitary figure of the artist in his studio. Along with his series of etchings that he executed in 1968, Suite 347, it was drawing which served as a vehicle for the artist’s meandering thoughts, desires and his vivid imagination to manifest itself into creative form; he stated, "I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to; basically it’s my way of writing fiction" (J. Richardson, "L’Époque Jacqueline," Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 29).
As Nu couché attests, the dominant subject of these late works is undoubtedly women. The female figure had been the site of some of Picasso’s most iconic and iconoclastic experimentations since the earliest days of his career. Alluring and adored, fearsome or monstrous, dismembered, voluptuous or gaunt, Picasso depicted women like no other artist, constantly exploring the innumerable facets of femininity, plundering the female psyche for artistic inspiration. “Picasso is the painter of woman,” Marie-Laure Bernadac has written, “goddess of antiquity, mother, praying mantis, blown-up balloon, weeper, hysteric, body curled in a ball or sprawled in sleep, pile of available flesh…fruitful mother or courtesan: no painter has ever gone so far unveiling the feminine universe in all the complexity of its real and fantasy life”(M-L. Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model," in ibid., p. 80). Reclining alone or in passionate embraces with men, pictured as frolicking Arcadian nymphs, or bawdy prostitutes trussed in stockings, the female figure appears in myriad guises in this late period of Picasso’s career. Yet what unites these different presentations is eroticism: the female figure is nearly always shown nude, frequently with their legs spread and genitalia exposed. On the same day that he created the present work, Picasso painted two other works on paper that feature the same commanding, expressively rendered reclining nude figure (Zervos, vol. 31, nos. 357-358). Dominating the sheet of paper, her pose and expression are enigmatic: is this figure in distress, about to flail her left arm behind her, or is she simply reclining, her exaggerated, distorted forms part of a strange vision of woman that had imposed itself upon Picasso. These expressive drawings form a diary of eroticism as the artist’s outpouring of creativity continued to flow until his death in 1973.
The unmediated and overt eroticism that characterizes Nu couché and Picasso’s other works of this time is often interpreted as a projection of the artist’s own sexual desires, which were by this time, unable to be fulfilled. The nude is no longer portrayed as a sensual and alluring presentation of femininity but is instead pictured with a raw and physical carnality and explicit eroticism. Like smoking, which the artist had been forced to give up, Picasso could no longer indulge in sexual activity. As he remarked to his friend, the photographer, Brassaï, “Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to offer you a cigarette, even though I know neither of us smokes any longer. Age has forced us to give it up, but the desire remains. It’s the same thing with making love. We don’t do it anymore but the desire is still with us!” (Picasso, quoted in ibid., p. 29). Sex, love and painting had long been intertwined in Picasso’s art, yet, in this last phase of his life, this dialogue came to the fore, with the act of art making becoming a substitute for the act of sex. As John Richardson writes, “The tools of the artist’s trade—his brushes—became surrogates for sexual parts to be used on a canvas that was a surrogate for the model” (ibid., p. 30). Indeed, when the artist was asked about the difference between eroticism and art, he replied unequivocally, “There is no difference” (quoted in ibid., p. 29). The often-crude sexual scenarios that Picasso drew, and his obsession with female genitalia can therefore be regarded as a means for the artist to relive a lost virility and express his irrepressible sexual desire. Yet more than this, by immersing himself in the depiction of this primal human urge, Picasso was reveling in the expression of life itself, harnessing this vitality as a means to defy the inexorable passage of time as he reached his final years.