L’amour masqué

The present work is one of a series of about 14 works that Picasso created on 5 January 1954 in Vallauris. Each work is executed in India ink, and presents a nude figure in a flirtatiously looking at a putti (l’Amour) holding a mask over his face. While a few examples include hints of a setting with some trees in the background, most depict solely on the two figures, allowing their playful interaction to remain the primary focus. One such example is located at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Beginning in 1953, the artist began shifting his focus back to the model, creating a variety of series of ink drawings depicting a nude accompanied by a male figure—an old man, an artist or a mystical figure, as is the case with the present work, among others. Indeed, as Karen Kleinfelder has noted, “in his nearly obsessive attempt to exhaust all the possible variations on the artist and model theme, the aging Picasso seems like a modern day Penelope, undoing in his late style what he had in his youth so effectively wrought, what indeed had to be considered the very basis of the modernist advancement: that of the ascendancy of form over content.” (Kleinfelder, op. cit., 1993, p. 15).
The present work was previously offered from the illustrious collections of Arthur and Anita Kahn, distinguished collectors and patrons of the arts, and James and Marilyn Alsdorf before them.