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Lot Essay
The classical spirit of Femme nue debout and the monumental simplicity of Picasso’s lines are a demonstration of the artist's Neoclassical style. Moving away from Synthetic Cubism, Picasso had in fact resorted to weighty, sculptural figures, bearing the serious stare and dignified elegance of the Classical Age. Questioned as to why he had stopped dedicating himself wholeheartedly to Cubism, Picasso had replied: "a man does not live by, cannot live by a single invention, a single discovery. It’s not that he could not make do with it, but exhaustion would rapidly create public indifference. And it’s not necessarily that he actively wants to make new progress in the researches he has undertaken; it is, on the contrary, that anyone of above-average sensibility is driven by the propensity to renew himself. Only mediocrity can endure a succession of days which are all the same" (quoted in E. Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, New York, 2002, pp. 392-393). Signalling a new departure in Picasso’s career, artworks such as Femme nue debout witness to the artist's growing interest in the human form that would absorb all his attention in the 1920s.
This period in the artist’s oeuvre showcases the subtle power of expression that Picasso could summon forth while working in the urbane, coolly classicizing style of portraiture that Olga had inspired in his work. “Picasso saw his wife as a classical type,” Elizabeth Cowling has written, “classical in the regularity and clear definition of her features, classical in the styling of her hair, classical in her reserve and poise” (ibid., p. 416).
Picasso and Olga first met in Rome in February 1917 while preparing and rehearsing Serge Diaghilev’s premiere production of the ballet Parade. They married the following year and took an apartment on the fashionable rue la Boétie, the new epicenter of the Parisian art trade. Thereafter, Olga assumed a variety of guises in her husband’s art. Often, he transformed her into a Greco-Roman goddess, her body and features exaggerated volumetrically to mythological proportions; elsewhere, she is portrayed as an exquisitely beautiful Italianate Madonna, a Spanish matron in a lace mantilla, or most tenderly, a new mother in touching maternity scenes inspired by the birth of their sole child, Paulo, in 1921. In the present work, her nudity and her contrapposto stance evoke an exalted and untouchable classical deity or Renaissance virgin.
This period in the artist’s oeuvre showcases the subtle power of expression that Picasso could summon forth while working in the urbane, coolly classicizing style of portraiture that Olga had inspired in his work. “Picasso saw his wife as a classical type,” Elizabeth Cowling has written, “classical in the regularity and clear definition of her features, classical in the styling of her hair, classical in her reserve and poise” (ibid., p. 416).
Picasso and Olga first met in Rome in February 1917 while preparing and rehearsing Serge Diaghilev’s premiere production of the ballet Parade. They married the following year and took an apartment on the fashionable rue la Boétie, the new epicenter of the Parisian art trade. Thereafter, Olga assumed a variety of guises in her husband’s art. Often, he transformed her into a Greco-Roman goddess, her body and features exaggerated volumetrically to mythological proportions; elsewhere, she is portrayed as an exquisitely beautiful Italianate Madonna, a Spanish matron in a lace mantilla, or most tenderly, a new mother in touching maternity scenes inspired by the birth of their sole child, Paulo, in 1921. In the present work, her nudity and her contrapposto stance evoke an exalted and untouchable classical deity or Renaissance virgin.