Nu couché et musicien

The present work focuses on a recurring theme in Picasso's oeuvre: the artist and the model. However, in the present picture it is no longer the painter but the man playing the guitar who shares the model's company outdoors. The guitar replaces the paintbrush; music replaces painting. "But this is not simply a return to an Arcadian motif. Something else is happening: Art, personified by painter and model, is giving itself over to the saber-rattling, flute-blowing, or melon-devouring represantatives of history and "eternal youth". In every statement he ever made Picasso invoked his right to the present. In these late paintings and drawings he widens the present to include the symbols of past and future. The model remains the center of all visions...Just as painter and model left the house and went out into the garden or the landscape, Picasso shifts the scene of his couple's meetings to the beach or a meadow. But the model is not always accompanied by a painter, a flute player or a writer. The couples are not always eating melons. All "action" has disappeared. No suggestion of genre or parody diverts attention to any kind of happening. The scene is rendered quite contemplatively, as though the painter had divorced himself from his activity and were now no more than an observer of the model. Picasso, usually so quick to respond to any pretext for playfulness, renounces it now for the sake of tense silence, perfectly expressed in the clarity of line and the few simple colors." (K. Gallwitz, Picasso The Heroic Years, New York 1985, pp. 176-177).