Lot Essay
The present sheet is one of twenty-three closely associated drawings that Picasso executed between May 19 and May 21, 1941; all of these show a reclining female nude with her head resting on her arms. Picasso made these drawings in preparation for the two great paintings of the female nude which he began to plan at the start of 1941 and which he finally executed in 1942, L'aubade (Zervos, vol. 12, no. 69; Muse national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and the Ganz Nu couch. (For a full account of this project, see the catalogue essay for Lot 49.) The drawings from May 1941 are an important stage in the genesis of this project. One sheet represents the first compositional sketch for L'aubade (Zervos, vol. 11, no. 138; Private Collection), and another sheet is the first schematic and geometrical interpretation of the figure as it appears in that painting (Zervos, vol. 11, no. 114; Private Collection).
In the present drawing, as in most of the sheets in this group, the figure is represented as physically ambivalent: she is two-faced like Janus, and her pose is simultaneously prone and supine. In his brilliant and celebrated essay on Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger, Leo Steinberg has studied the artist's fascination with this pose. Discussing two drawings from May 1941 that are closely related to the present sheet, he has written:
A Sleeping Nude, prone on her stomach, shows her top sunny-side up, and her face facing both ways, like the covers of a dropped book splayed out. Yet the body coheres; there is neither Cubist dismemberment nor schematic disjunction. These figures work, and Picasso's draughtsmanship makes their irrational translocations seem genuinely informative about the rotundity of the object observed.... Picasso's feat is to have created a syntax of inventible intervals within which such transpositions do not simply register as jokes or mistakes. The displacements themselves are not hard to make; making them work, making them human, required the better part of Picasso's life...
Throughout the early 1940s, Picasso made his astonishing studies of sleeping nudes--compact in substance, in position both prone and supine, every viewpoint produced and retained. The scrambling of aspects continues, the figures repeatedly hard and ugly but always centripetal, always generating coherence; and one looks and keeps looking, marveling how these impossible contradictions seem to grow normal and necessary, until you wonder how we ever put up with the poor showing of one-sided representation. (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, New York, 1972, pp. 207-208)
In the present drawing, as in most of the sheets in this group, the figure is represented as physically ambivalent: she is two-faced like Janus, and her pose is simultaneously prone and supine. In his brilliant and celebrated essay on Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger, Leo Steinberg has studied the artist's fascination with this pose. Discussing two drawings from May 1941 that are closely related to the present sheet, he has written:
A Sleeping Nude, prone on her stomach, shows her top sunny-side up, and her face facing both ways, like the covers of a dropped book splayed out. Yet the body coheres; there is neither Cubist dismemberment nor schematic disjunction. These figures work, and Picasso's draughtsmanship makes their irrational translocations seem genuinely informative about the rotundity of the object observed.... Picasso's feat is to have created a syntax of inventible intervals within which such transpositions do not simply register as jokes or mistakes. The displacements themselves are not hard to make; making them work, making them human, required the better part of Picasso's life...
Throughout the early 1940s, Picasso made his astonishing studies of sleeping nudes--compact in substance, in position both prone and supine, every viewpoint produced and retained. The scrambling of aspects continues, the figures repeatedly hard and ugly but always centripetal, always generating coherence; and one looks and keeps looking, marveling how these impossible contradictions seem to grow normal and necessary, until you wonder how we ever put up with the poor showing of one-sided representation. (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, New York, 1972, pp. 207-208)