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Lot Essay
Picasso's late paintings, drawings and prints are renowned for their celebration of love and sexuality, fueling for many the myth of the aging artist as a preternaturally vigorous and libidinous satyr. Picasso's publishers contributed to this perception, by packaging his late works in such a way to appeal to the prurient interest of the public. However, during the 1960s and thereafter, such works are more fantasy than reality and are perhaps even more fascinating for being so. John Richardson, Picasso's biographer, observed that "Picasso's sexual powers may have waned--impotence is thought to have set in around his eightieth year--but sex was still very much on his mind" (in intro. Christie's, New York, sale catalogue, 19 November 1998, p. 7).
To compensate for this fading aspect of their marriage, Picasso often placed his wife Jacqueline--who was always his female model in this period, even if she did not pose--in erotic situations set in the realm of fantasy, which seem intended to enliven the sexual discourse in their relationship. In some of his seedier scenarios Picasso imagined Jacqueline with much younger lovers or in brothels, where the artist himself occasionally makes an appearance as a leering voyeur. The present work, on the other hand, is filled with joyful erotic abandon. Jacqueline appears as a frenzied maenad, with all proprieties flung aside as she engages in a wild naked dance with the boy Cupid. Her long black hair, normally seen in more sedate portraits brushed back and secured with a hair band, is here unloosened and unbound. Her hand, tipped with her emblematic red nails, is stretched high in ecstatic surrender to the boy love god's irresistible power.
The source for this female-Cupid duo is a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus and Cupid (circa 1550; coll. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). In 1949 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler sent Picasso a postcard of this painting, which the artist used as the basis for an aquatint and two lithographs (Bloch, nos. 1835, and 613-614 respectively). The prints are a faithful translation of the Cranach painting into Picasso's characteristic graphic manner. In the present drawing the artist returned to this subject, as he would rework countless other earlier themes at this late point in his career, and this time gave it a personal twist, by transforming Cranach's sedately nude Venus into a frantic victim of Cupid's arrows.
The present drawing also recalls the frolicking bathers from Picasso's classical and surrealist periods of the 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed, the awkward, implausible placement of Jacqueline's legs may go back even further, to the willful dislocations of the human figure that appeared in Picasso's African-inspired paintings during the preliminary phase of cubism, as in Nu debout (1907; Zervos, vol. 26, no. 263) and Nu debout (1908; Zervos, vol. 26, no. 366). Both paintings remained in the artist's collection until his death, and one can imagine the artist revisiting them from time to time, still pondering their lessons six decades after he painted them, this time in a new and altogether different context.
To compensate for this fading aspect of their marriage, Picasso often placed his wife Jacqueline--who was always his female model in this period, even if she did not pose--in erotic situations set in the realm of fantasy, which seem intended to enliven the sexual discourse in their relationship. In some of his seedier scenarios Picasso imagined Jacqueline with much younger lovers or in brothels, where the artist himself occasionally makes an appearance as a leering voyeur. The present work, on the other hand, is filled with joyful erotic abandon. Jacqueline appears as a frenzied maenad, with all proprieties flung aside as she engages in a wild naked dance with the boy Cupid. Her long black hair, normally seen in more sedate portraits brushed back and secured with a hair band, is here unloosened and unbound. Her hand, tipped with her emblematic red nails, is stretched high in ecstatic surrender to the boy love god's irresistible power.
The source for this female-Cupid duo is a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus and Cupid (circa 1550; coll. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). In 1949 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler sent Picasso a postcard of this painting, which the artist used as the basis for an aquatint and two lithographs (Bloch, nos. 1835, and 613-614 respectively). The prints are a faithful translation of the Cranach painting into Picasso's characteristic graphic manner. In the present drawing the artist returned to this subject, as he would rework countless other earlier themes at this late point in his career, and this time gave it a personal twist, by transforming Cranach's sedately nude Venus into a frantic victim of Cupid's arrows.
The present drawing also recalls the frolicking bathers from Picasso's classical and surrealist periods of the 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed, the awkward, implausible placement of Jacqueline's legs may go back even further, to the willful dislocations of the human figure that appeared in Picasso's African-inspired paintings during the preliminary phase of cubism, as in Nu debout (1907; Zervos, vol. 26, no. 263) and Nu debout (1908; Zervos, vol. 26, no. 366). Both paintings remained in the artist's collection until his death, and one can imagine the artist revisiting them from time to time, still pondering their lessons six decades after he painted them, this time in a new and altogether different context.