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Lot Essay
‘Whenever I meet a friend, my first reaction is to search in my pocket for a pack of Gauloises, in order to offer him one, just as I always used to. Even though I know very well that neither of us smoke anymore. In vain, old age forces us to give up some things; the desire remains. It’s the same with love. We can’t make love anymore, but the desire is still there. I still reach into my pocket’ (Pablo Picasso, speaking with his biographer-friend Pierre Cabanne, quoted in J. Hoffeld, ‘Picasso’s Endgame’, in Picasso, The Late Drawings, exh. cat, New York, 1981, p. 13).
Depicting a scene of lustful contemplation, Nu et homme assis exemplifies the lascivious imagery into which Picasso channelled, at the end of his career, the extraordinary force of his creative inventiveness. The voluptuous nude reclines back in an ecstatic pose as if offering herself to the man aside her; her sex prominently exhibited and her hand touching one of her breasts like a full and youthful fruit, she appears as a willing and enticing lover. The swelling lines and voluptuous curves that Picasso used to describe his figures, sublimate their desire in visual terms, while demonstrating the artist’s prodigious mastery of the medium.
In 1970, at the time Nu et homme assis was executed, Picasso had just turned ninety and was nearing the end of his life. The male subject, wearing the hat, is reminiscent of his series of musketeers, a body of work which had intensified throughout the late 1960s and would continue until the year of his death, in 1973. In early 1966, while in Mougins convalescing from surgery he had undergone some months previously, Picasso re-read Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. He had just begun painting again, and before long this new character had entered his work, the musketeer, or the Spanish version of the 17th century cavalier, the hidalgo, a rakish nobleman skilled with the sword and daring in his romantic exploits. The brave and virile musketeer was strongly identifiable with the frail and aging artist himself, but also provided Picasso with a pretext to indulge in his love of Rembrandt, Velázquez and other great painters of the Baroque. Thus, finding himself here, at the feet of a beautiful young woman the heroic protagonist has the opportunity to stage yet another conquest. In this way, the fantasy of his youth is played out in Picasso's art, meditating both on his desire for carnal pleasure and what it means to enter a new stage of life.
Depicting a scene of lustful contemplation, Nu et homme assis exemplifies the lascivious imagery into which Picasso channelled, at the end of his career, the extraordinary force of his creative inventiveness. The voluptuous nude reclines back in an ecstatic pose as if offering herself to the man aside her; her sex prominently exhibited and her hand touching one of her breasts like a full and youthful fruit, she appears as a willing and enticing lover. The swelling lines and voluptuous curves that Picasso used to describe his figures, sublimate their desire in visual terms, while demonstrating the artist’s prodigious mastery of the medium.
In 1970, at the time Nu et homme assis was executed, Picasso had just turned ninety and was nearing the end of his life. The male subject, wearing the hat, is reminiscent of his series of musketeers, a body of work which had intensified throughout the late 1960s and would continue until the year of his death, in 1973. In early 1966, while in Mougins convalescing from surgery he had undergone some months previously, Picasso re-read Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. He had just begun painting again, and before long this new character had entered his work, the musketeer, or the Spanish version of the 17th century cavalier, the hidalgo, a rakish nobleman skilled with the sword and daring in his romantic exploits. The brave and virile musketeer was strongly identifiable with the frail and aging artist himself, but also provided Picasso with a pretext to indulge in his love of Rembrandt, Velázquez and other great painters of the Baroque. Thus, finding himself here, at the feet of a beautiful young woman the heroic protagonist has the opportunity to stage yet another conquest. In this way, the fantasy of his youth is played out in Picasso's art, meditating both on his desire for carnal pleasure and what it means to enter a new stage of life.