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Lot Essay
On the last day of 1967, Picasso made two drawings showing a nude odalisque cavorting with an eastern potentate (Zervos, vol. 27 nos. 169 and 170; the former sold at Christie's New York, 2 November 2005, lot 225). This theme set Picasso's agenda for the first month-and-a-half of 1968, when he executed more than 30 drawings, including the present work, in which he depicted odalisques in various groupings and poses, set in a harem boudoir or bath.
Picasso's Orientalism was a late phenomenon in his work, a theme which came to the fore following the death of Matisse in November 1954. Picasso executed his important sequence of paintings based on Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger, 1833 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) in late 1954 and early 1955 as a tribute to his admired and recently deceased friend. 'When Matisse died,' Picasso told Roland Penrose, 'he left his odalisques to me as a legacy, and this is my idea of the Orient though I have never been there' (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 396). Picasso had been considering a composition based on Femmes d'Alger since 1940, when he made some studies in a Royan sketchbook. In 1954 Picasso had a new love who stimulated his interest in this theme, Jacqueline Roque, whose profile he thought resembled that of the right-hand figure in Delacroix's painting. Another important source for Picasso's fascination with the theme of the odalisque went back even further. He first saw Ingres' Le bain turc (fig. 1) in the Salon d'Automne in 1905, to which it had been lent by its erstwhile owner, Prince Amédée de Broglie, who sold it to the Louvre in 1911. Le bain turc was chief among those works by Ingres that led Picasso to explore a new classicizing manner, his own retour à Ingres, during and after the First World War. Many of Picasso's later bather subjects, from the Biarritz beach drawings of 1918 through the 'surrealist' figures of the 1930s, as well as most of his nudes thereafter, bear the imprint, directly or less apparently, of Le bain turc, showing the degree to which Picasso appropriated and assimilated its classical, yet sensual, voyeuristic and Orientalist character.
John Richardson has pointed out yet another catalyst for Picasso's late fascination with the Near East. 'Even television played a role in the development of Picasso's late style,' he wrote. 'To distract herself during the long hours when her husband was working, Jacqueline bought a television set. The two of them developed a taste for old movies. One film in particular, The Lives of the Bengal Lancers [starring Gary Cooper, 1935], triggered a series of drawings - a sultan surrounded by big-bosomed odalisques...' (in 'L'époque Jacqueline,' Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 29).
As in Delacroix's Femmes d'Algers, there are three women in this delightful drawing - this number may also have been intended to suggest the three Graces of classical mythology - but here they are nude, in the manner of Ingres' Le bain turc. Their poses represent Picasso's own variants on the figures in Ingres' composition, and he has even combined more than one pose or point of view in the same figure. The reclining nude at right gazes askance, as if having spied the artist/viewer - the charmed voyeurs to this pleasantly indolent scene. The odalisques are gathered around a low table set with a teapot and cups, as in Le bain turc; Picasso is supposed to have similarly derived from Ingres' painting the placement of the still-life in the foreground of Les demoiselles d'Avigon, which he painted six decades earlier.
Picasso's New Year's flurry of interest in the seraglio came to a close in mid-February 1968. The artist continued to feature these voluptuous nudes in his drawings, as he would to the very end of his life, but at this time he made a significant change of scene, as he installed his courtesans in a 17th century Spanish bordello, attended by their procuress and an assortment of cavaliers. Marie-Laure Bernadac has written, 'The women of those last years remain young and attractive; they are arrogant, sometimes comical; they have massive and ample shapes... No painter has gone so far in unveiling the female universe, in unraveling the complexity of its reality and its fantasies' (in 'The Painter and his Model,' Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 440).
(fig. 1) J.A.D. Ingres, Le bain turc, 1863; Musée du Louvre, Paris.
© Photo RMN, Musee du Louvre
Picasso's Orientalism was a late phenomenon in his work, a theme which came to the fore following the death of Matisse in November 1954. Picasso executed his important sequence of paintings based on Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger, 1833 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) in late 1954 and early 1955 as a tribute to his admired and recently deceased friend. 'When Matisse died,' Picasso told Roland Penrose, 'he left his odalisques to me as a legacy, and this is my idea of the Orient though I have never been there' (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 396). Picasso had been considering a composition based on Femmes d'Alger since 1940, when he made some studies in a Royan sketchbook. In 1954 Picasso had a new love who stimulated his interest in this theme, Jacqueline Roque, whose profile he thought resembled that of the right-hand figure in Delacroix's painting. Another important source for Picasso's fascination with the theme of the odalisque went back even further. He first saw Ingres' Le bain turc (fig. 1) in the Salon d'Automne in 1905, to which it had been lent by its erstwhile owner, Prince Amédée de Broglie, who sold it to the Louvre in 1911. Le bain turc was chief among those works by Ingres that led Picasso to explore a new classicizing manner, his own retour à Ingres, during and after the First World War. Many of Picasso's later bather subjects, from the Biarritz beach drawings of 1918 through the 'surrealist' figures of the 1930s, as well as most of his nudes thereafter, bear the imprint, directly or less apparently, of Le bain turc, showing the degree to which Picasso appropriated and assimilated its classical, yet sensual, voyeuristic and Orientalist character.
John Richardson has pointed out yet another catalyst for Picasso's late fascination with the Near East. 'Even television played a role in the development of Picasso's late style,' he wrote. 'To distract herself during the long hours when her husband was working, Jacqueline bought a television set. The two of them developed a taste for old movies. One film in particular, The Lives of the Bengal Lancers [starring Gary Cooper, 1935], triggered a series of drawings - a sultan surrounded by big-bosomed odalisques...' (in 'L'époque Jacqueline,' Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 29).
As in Delacroix's Femmes d'Algers, there are three women in this delightful drawing - this number may also have been intended to suggest the three Graces of classical mythology - but here they are nude, in the manner of Ingres' Le bain turc. Their poses represent Picasso's own variants on the figures in Ingres' composition, and he has even combined more than one pose or point of view in the same figure. The reclining nude at right gazes askance, as if having spied the artist/viewer - the charmed voyeurs to this pleasantly indolent scene. The odalisques are gathered around a low table set with a teapot and cups, as in Le bain turc; Picasso is supposed to have similarly derived from Ingres' painting the placement of the still-life in the foreground of Les demoiselles d'Avigon, which he painted six decades earlier.
Picasso's New Year's flurry of interest in the seraglio came to a close in mid-February 1968. The artist continued to feature these voluptuous nudes in his drawings, as he would to the very end of his life, but at this time he made a significant change of scene, as he installed his courtesans in a 17th century Spanish bordello, attended by their procuress and an assortment of cavaliers. Marie-Laure Bernadac has written, 'The women of those last years remain young and attractive; they are arrogant, sometimes comical; they have massive and ample shapes... No painter has gone so far in unveiling the female universe, in unraveling the complexity of its reality and its fantasies' (in 'The Painter and his Model,' Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 440).
(fig. 1) J.A.D. Ingres, Le bain turc, 1863; Musée du Louvre, Paris.
© Photo RMN, Musee du Louvre