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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 prodigious output and the stylistic vigor these works display. His blatant portrayal of woman as a 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" (M.-L. Bernadac, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, Late Picasso, 1988, p. 80). According to John Richardson, "to compensate for his loss of libido, Picasso came to see sex and art, the brothel and the studio, as metaphors for each other -the sexual act standing for the creative act, and vice-versa. Hence the explicitly erotic nature of so many of these late drawings."
Picasso's obsessive theme of the artist and his model now undergoes a metamorphosis into an erotic relationship, and this stimulates an extraordinary prolific period of works which marks the rise of a new painting (ibid.). From 1959-1962, Picasso created over one hundred seventy-five paintings and drawings inspired by Manet's masterpiece Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 (coll. Musée d'Orsay, Paris). These works, his most prolific group of variations after the work of another artist, are mostly joyous in tone, but also occasionally descend into violence, lewd comedy and menace. The present drawing, while not one of the specific variations on the subject, clearly continues to explore the erotic spirit of these later works, as well as the nature of the relationship between the artist (as personified by the musketeer) and model.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries who were interested only in abstraction, Picasso never lost his interest in the human figure and the nude, even in the final decade of his life. His works during this period are a summation of the achievements of a lifetime of creating art, and draw upon the fantastic compendium of characters he portrayed and styles he initiated during the various periods of his creative development.
Picasso's obsessive theme of the artist and his model now undergoes a metamorphosis into an erotic relationship, and this stimulates an extraordinary prolific period of works which marks the rise of a new painting (ibid.). From 1959-1962, Picasso created over one hundred seventy-five paintings and drawings inspired by Manet's masterpiece Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 (coll. Musée d'Orsay, Paris). These works, his most prolific group of variations after the work of another artist, are mostly joyous in tone, but also occasionally descend into violence, lewd comedy and menace. The present drawing, while not one of the specific variations on the subject, clearly continues to explore the erotic spirit of these later works, as well as the nature of the relationship between the artist (as personified by the musketeer) and model.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries who were interested only in abstraction, Picasso never lost his interest in the human figure and the nude, even in the final decade of his life. His works during this period are a summation of the achievements of a lifetime of creating art, and draw upon the fantastic compendium of characters he portrayed and styles he initiated during the various periods of his creative development.