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Lot Essay
Picasso's final years are marked by an acute sense of urgency, which is exemplified both by the artist's prodigiuos output and the stylistic vigour these works display. At no other time in his life was he more productive and at the same time so aware of his own mortality, leading him to state: "I have less and less time, and I have more and more to say." (Exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London, Late Picasso, 1988, p. 85).
The blatant portrayal of woman as sexual being corresponds to the increasing eroticism of his late paintings and the continued presentation of woman as "the object of desire and the eternal subject of painting." (Ibid., p. 80). In Maurie-Laure Bernadec's analysis of Picasso's late paintings, she considers him "the painter of woman." She goes on to state: "no painter has ever gone so far in unveiling the feminine universe in all the complexity of its real and fantasy life. This intimate, passionate awareness is a constant source of renewal for his painting, which reveals in the variety of the repertoire of forms that it affords, mineral and carnal by turns. He thus works with an infinite range of possibilities that makes all metamorphoses possible.
"A woman's body is the obstacle on to which he projects his male desire and his creative energy. The gap between art and reality, and the irremedable distance between man and woman, enable him to keep up the tension. Picasso's obsessive theme of the artist and his model now undergoes a metamorphosis into an erotic relationship, and this stimulates an extraordinarily prolific period of works which marks the rise of a new painting." (Ibid., p. 80).
The blatant portrayal of woman as sexual being corresponds to the increasing eroticism of his late paintings and the continued presentation of woman as "the object of desire and the eternal subject of painting." (Ibid., p. 80). In Maurie-Laure Bernadec's analysis of Picasso's late paintings, she considers him "the painter of woman." She goes on to state: "no painter has ever gone so far in unveiling the feminine universe in all the complexity of its real and fantasy life. This intimate, passionate awareness is a constant source of renewal for his painting, which reveals in the variety of the repertoire of forms that it affords, mineral and carnal by turns. He thus works with an infinite range of possibilities that makes all metamorphoses possible.
"A woman's body is the obstacle on to which he projects his male desire and his creative energy. The gap between art and reality, and the irremedable distance between man and woman, enable him to keep up the tension. Picasso's obsessive theme of the artist and his model now undergoes a metamorphosis into an erotic relationship, and this stimulates an extraordinarily prolific period of works which marks the rise of a new painting." (Ibid., p. 80).