Homme et femme nus debout

This drawing is the fourth in a sequence of five compositions on the bathers theme done during the final two days of January 1969. In the first two drawings the male figure is a lean young man and approximately the same age as his female companions, and in the third he is transformed into a chubby and irrepressibly virile Cupid. Here the male bather assumes the persona normally favored by the artist to represent himself in his pictures. He is a bearded older man, like a senior deity in the pantheon of the ancient Greeks, or simply a tireless satyr, paunchy but sexually well-endowed. In this guise Picasso depicts the fantasy of being pursued by an extremely attractive young and nymph-like woman, here seen nude, with her hair in youthfully stylish bangs and pony-tail. She raises her arms to seize and embrace him. She is colored a ripe pink, while the older man has presumably reached the age where he is gray and may be depicted without color.

The female figure here is Picasso's wife Jacqueline whom he married in 1961, when he was nearly eighty and she was thirty-four. By projecting himself into the form of a satyr or Greek god, Picasso peels back the anecdotal, everyday aspect of his themes and reveals an underlying mythic dimension. "Picasso now chose to work with isolated figures, archetypes, and concentrated on the essential: the nude, the couple, man in disguise or stripped bare: it was his way of dealing with the subject of women, love and the human comedy" (M.-L. Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model," Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 78).