Nu assis et tête

Picasso drew Nu assis et tête on 13 October 1969, less than two weeks shy of his eighty-eighth birthday. It depicts a seated (or partially reclining) female nude, her legs spread to expose her sex, the thighs foreshortened and the feet crossed at the ankles; she cups one breast in each hand, as if offering herself for display. To the left, a disembodied male head stares fixedly at the nude woman, his eyes open wide and his pupils dilated. The image has its origins in the extended series of the artist and model that had preoccupied Picasso from 1963 until 1965, in which the painter observes his nude muse across a canvas barrier, possessing her through paint. Now, however, Picasso has stripped away the artist's accoutrements, inscribing the drama of the scene solely in terms of the voyeuristic, appropriating gaze. Karen Kleinfelder has written, "What is left is the elemental conflict or psychodrama that had been underlying Picasso's treatment of the artist and model theme from its earliest inception: that of man confronting woman, self confronting other, the power of the look, and the play of desire... Picasso, in effect, makes us voyeurs of voyeurism. It is the scopic drive, the gazing impulse, the desire to possess through the look that we witness, and by implication, that we engage in as well. In this sense, the male voyeurs that Picasso depicts also mirror the artist, whose controlling gaze staged this recurring spectacle in the first place" (The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso's Pursuit of the Model, Chicago, 1993, pp. 186-187).

A fortnight after he drew Nu assis et tête, between 23 and 25 October, Picasso painted five large canvases that depict a man and woman entwined in a passionate embrace, consummating their desire in manifestly physical terms (Zervos, vol. 31, nos. 474-475, 482-484). In the present drawing, by contrast, the male figure is reduced to a colossal head, immobile as a statue bust, incapable of action--all eyes, as it were. The difference in scale between the two figures underscores the distance that by definition separates the voyeur from the object of his desire, transforming her from a genuinely carnal specimen into a spectacle, the concentric circles of her exposed nipple equated (in a clever visual pun) to the man's dilated pupil. The nude has the long, glossy hair of Picasso's last great love Jacqueline, whose image is omnipresent in his late work, and we are reminded of the artist's comment to his long-time friend Brassaï about the waning of his own much-vaunted sexual powers: "Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to offer you a cigarette, even though I know that 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!" (quoted in Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 29).

Far from an allegory of impotence, however, Nu assis et tête reveals what lies at the heart of Picasso's spectacular flowering of creativity during the final decade of his career: the synergy between man and woman, artist and model, observer and observed. The act of looking that Picasso depicts here is the veritable starting point of creation, and the nude woman represents not only the object of desire but also the eternal subject of painting (hence the picture frame that appears on the wall behind her in Picasso's very next drawing from the same day: Zervos, vol. 31, no. 457; Christie's, New York, 8 May 2002, lot 144). Marie-Laure Bernadac has concluded, "A woman's body is the obstacle onto which Picasso projects his male desire and his creative energy. The gap between art and reality, and the irremediable distance between man and woman, enable him to keep up the tension...and stimulate an extraordinarily prolific period of work" (ibid., p. 80).