Le peintre et son modèle

At the beginning of 1963, Pablo Picasso became obsessed by a subject that had stood at the heart of his art for the entirety of his career. Over the course of two weeks in February, he filled the pages of a small carnet with more than two dozen sketches of a studio interior in which a painter is seen working at his easel in the presence of a reclining nude model (Musée Picasso, Carnet no. 59). On 2 March he began the first of an extended series of oil paintings on this theme (Zervos, vol. 23, no. 154; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen). Hélène Parmelin, the wife of painter Edouard Pignon, both of whom were close friends of the artist, recounted the excitement surrounding the inception of these works: “Picasso lets loose. He paints ‘The Painter and his Model.' And from that moment on he paints like a madman, perhaps never before with such frenzy” (op. cit., 1965, p. 10). On 27 March, Picasso acknowledged that he was in the grip of a new and compelling inspiration when he declared to Michel Leiris: “Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants” (quoted in P. Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 349).
From this point until 1965 Picasso painted and drew mostly variations on this theme. The artist and model appear together, as in Le peintre et son modèle, or alone as male or female portraits and nude figure paintings. The male subjects are almost invariably stand-ins for Picasso himself—in the present work he is sporting the artist’s signature blue-and-white striped Breton top—and the models are most typically the figure of his wife, Jacqueline. He gave relatively little time to other subjects, and it was not until the musketeers made their appearance in April 1967 that his preoccupation with the artist and model theme appeared to have subsided, although it was still far from having run its course, and it continued to manifest itself in new guises.
Held in the same private family collection since 1997, Le peintre et son modèle is a quintessential example of this great series of artist and model works, executed on an unusually large scale. Painted in early November 1964, this is one of an autumn campaign from this year, which is characterized by the mostly large canvases executed in both vertical and horizontal formats. The 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. In the present work, a minimally described brush, palette and the barest suggestion of an easel are discernible in the bottom left corner; the artist himself appears to be turning away from his tools to speak to his female companion, who is gently enveloped in folds of blue and white fabric. The warmth and intimacy of their relationship is self-evident from their smiles and the direction of the model’s gaze.
Though the subject of the artist and model had been a prominent theme weaving through the various strands of Picasso’s multi-faceted oeuvre, never before had the artist explored so closely and with such intensity this essential artistic relationship of the painter and his subject. 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...’” (Picasso: The Artist and His Model, New York, 1965, pp. 9-10).
Picasso had finished his look backwards to the art of the great masters that had come before him—Eugène Delacroix, Diego Velázquez, Edouard Manet and Nicolas Poussin—and instead honed in on the very nature of art making itself. As if trying to find the key to his own innate abilities as a painter, he focused entirely on the realm of the studio, the private, haloed sanctum of artistic inspiration and creativity. Here, as Marie-Laure Bernadac described, he captured upon the canvas, “the impossible, the secret alchemy that takes place between the real model, the artist’s vision and feeling, and the reality of paint” (Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 76).
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. It is her presence and image that fills so much of Picasso’s work of this time. Having met in the early 1950s, the pair were married in 1961. 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” (Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, 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 twentieth 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” (quoted in K.L. Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Chicago and London, 1993, p. 137).