Nu assis sur un tapis rayé

In 1961, shortly after his marriage to Jacqueline Roque, Pablo Picasso moved to Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins. This chateau, situated in a medieval hilltop village overlooking Cannes, was Picasso’s primary residence and studio for the remainder of his life. It was there that he continued to paint a series of exuberant, brightly coloured, reclining nudes – including the present work, Nu assis sur un tapis rayé, in December 1964. In previous works, Picasso painted a young model accompanied by a lover-artist or swashbuckling musketeer; in this painting, however, she appears alone, revelling in her own sensual nudity.

The present work is deeply indebted to the influence of Picasso’s young wife Jacqueline. This striking woman with strong, dark features was an omnipresent muse during this final phase of Picasso’s career, which the art historian John Richardson referred to as l’epoque Jacqueline: her sharp profile, pronounced cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes with sculpted brows, and thick, wavy black hair appear in many canvases of this period. According Marie-Laure Bernadac, the curator of the 1988 exhibition at the Tate Gallery and Centre Pompidou, Late Picasso, Jacqueline never actually posed for Picasso in his studio at Mougins; nonetheless, the spectre of her beauty haunted his work for the rest of his life.

Nu assis sur un tapis rayé also participates in a broader discourse – Picasso’s own enormous painterly corpus, as well as the long European fascination with the painted female nude, dating to the art of the Italian Renaissance. Picasso’s Nu assis, situated on a boldly-striped textile, vaguely refers to the orientalized women of the French Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Romanticist Eugène Delacroix. Picasso’s longtime rival and friend, Henri Matisse, had previously taken up this torch and painted his own twentieth-century odalisques, including works such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Odalisque, harmonie rouge (1926-1927), situated amongst the elegant furnishings of his home in the South of France.

After Matisse’s death in 1954, however, Picasso imagined himself to be the heir to this tradition, saying ‘When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy’ (quoted in M.-L. Bernadac, Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 55). Unlike Matisse’s modern odalisques, who were often oblivious to the viewer and coyly draped with sheer or patterned fabrics, Picasso’s Nu assis possesses an incisive gaze and leaves little else to the imagination. As Picasso’s friend and  biographer Hélène Parmelin observed, ‘The admirable nudes of Matisse have no sex, just as they have no glances. The nudes of Picasso have a glance and a sex. The sex of a nude is for him an essential part of the body whose reality he seeks’ (Picasso: The Artist and His Model, New York, 1965, p. 158).

In the present work, Jacqueline’s elegant figure has been summarised with a series of curves and undulating strokes of paint, which convey the most erotic elements of her body. Picasso’s renewed commitment to bold, nearly abstract lines, which emphasise the flatness of the canvas, may be attributed in part to his contemporary experiments with printmaking. The present painting’s advantage over Picasso’s linear prints, of course, is undoubtedly the fresh Mediterranean colours – gorgeous salmony-pink, turquoise and aquamarine – and the rich painterly brushwork that endows the surface with such personality. This painting exemplifies the artist’s ‘late style,’ which was described by Bernadac as follows: ‘The late style, which first emerged in the course of 1964, is characterized by the juxtaposition of two ways of painting: one elliptical and stenographic, made up of ideograms, codified signs which can be inventoried; and the other thick and flowing, a hastily applied matière of runny, impastoed, roughly brushed paint’ (ibid., p. 85).

Nu assis sur un tapis rayé, which effectively combines both of the aforementioned painting techniques, has been in the same private Danish collection since 1999. The painting was first owned by the Galerie Louise Leiris – Picasso’s longtime dealer and representative. Leiris was the stepdaughter and successor to the legendary dealer of modern art – as well as one-time subject of Picasso – Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler; Leiris visited Picasso and Jacqueline at Mougins and represented the artist until his death the following year, in 1973.