Le peintre et son modèle

In 1963, Pablo Picasso left behind his decade-long exploration into the art of a number of great masters of the past—Velázquez, Delacroix, Manet, and later Poussin—and turned instead to a closely related, fundamental part of artmaking: the intimate, intense and ultimately enigmatic relationship between the artist and model. Formerly in the collection of Picasso’s wife, Jacqueline Roque, before passing to her daughter, Catherine Hutin-Blay, Le peintre et son modèle is one of this great series of artist and model works. Starting in February 1963, this theme reappeared several times over the course of the following years, reaching a culmination with one final group in March 1965. Painted on 15 November 1964, the present work is one of an autumn campaign, which is characterized by the mostly large canvases executed in both vertical and horizontal formats. Like the present work, this group is distinguished by its light, pastel palette of delicate pale greens and pink or lavender tones, as if painted with the silvery winter Mediterranean light flooding through the windows into his studio. Laid over these hues is a series of black lines that define the essential features of the male painter and female nude, their bodies appearing from an almost cryptogram-like arrangement of lines and shapes that delineate their faces and bodies.

The theme of the artist and model and the closely related atelier scenes appears time and again throughout Picasso’s career. From his enigmatic L'artiste et son modèle of 1914 (Musée Picasso, Paris) to the 1928 Le peintre et son modèle (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), these works often signalled an important change or transition in his art. The 1960s Artist and Model scenes are no exception. When, in 1963, Picasso began this series, Hélène Parmelin recalled the artist’s fervent embrace of this motif: “And now he says he is turning his back on everything”, she described. “He says he is embarking upon an incredible adventure. He says that everything is changed; it is over and done with; painting is completely different from what one had thought—perhaps it is even the opposite. It is a time that he declares himself ready to kill modern ‘art’—and hence art itself—in order to rediscover painting... One must, says Picasso, look for something that develops all by itself, something natural and not manufactured. ‘Let it unfold in the form of the natural and not in the form of art... The grass as grass, the tree as tree, the nude as nude...’” (H. Parmelin, Picasso: The Artist and His Model, New York, 1965, pp. 9-10).

The abiding presence in this great series of works was Picasso’s great love, second wife and indomitable muse of his late period: Jacqueline Picasso. With her dark almond shaped eyes and voluminous raven colored hair, it is her presence and image that peoples so much of Picasso’s work of this time. Having met in the early 1950s, the pair were married in 1961. More than a wife however, Jacqueline served as Picasso’s most beloved companion, protector, muse and model. As William Rubin wrote, “Picasso did not have to win Jacqueline from another man, nor struggle to keep her. Her understated, gentle, and loving personality, combined with her unconditional commitment to him, provided an emotionally stable life and a dependable foyer over a longer period that he had ever before enjoyed” (W. Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., New York, 1996, p. 458).

When considered in a wider artistic context, Le peintre et son modèle and the rest of this series once again show Picasso as an artist who remained at the forefront of the avant-garde until the end. In the early 1960s, abstraction reigned supreme, with Pop art and Minimalism coming to the fore. Traditional easel painting, many were suggesting, was redundant and outmoded, its future questioned in a time when industrial materials and mechanical techniques dominated artistic production. Yet, just as he had in the early 20th Century, Picasso defied expectation by remaining resolutely bound to the essential, time-honored elements and processes of art. His large canvases painted with gestural, lavish strokes of thick color and strident lines that depict, through timeless subjects of the artist or the model, the very act of painting itself, showed that the medium was far from dead; indeed, as Picasso showed, it was thriving. “There is no abstract art”, the artist had declared in 1935. “You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark” (Picasso, quoted in K.L. Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Chicago & London, 1993, p. 137).