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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso's large-scale 1972 wax crayon drawing, Couple, depicts lovers in an embrace so intimate that their limbs are completely intertwined, such that it is difficult to distinguish between them. Picasso rendered their erotic union with a profusion of striated lines in bold primary and secondary colors, using blue crayon to silhouette the figures; red to detail their faces, genitals, fingers, and toes; and green to suggest the shadows between their bodies.
Throughout his late eighties and early nineties, Picasso remained as sharp and prolific as ever, producing hundreds of paintings, drawings and engravings between 1968 and 1972 alone. This sheet exemplifies one of the artist's greatest preoccupations in the final decade of his career: brightly colored, rapidly executed line drawings depicting young lovers. Erotic fervor was an ideal analogy for Picasso's passion for his art; as his biographer John Richardson later wrote: "Picasso's sexual powers may have waned....but sex was still very much on his mind. 'We [Picasso and his wife Jacqueline] don't do it anymore, but the desire is still with us,' he told Brassaï. To compensate for his loss of libido, Picasso came to see sex and art, the brothel and the studio, as metaphors for each other—the sexual act standing for the creative act, and vice-versa. Hence the explicitly erotic nature of so many of these late drawings" (Cavaliers and Courtesans: A Collection of Picasso Master Drawings, Christie's, New York, November 1998, p. 7).
This romantic coupling is not soft or gentle; instead, it is a shockingly physical encounter. The artist's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier-Picasso, wrote of his late works, "These are not embraces but wrestling matches the sexes have abandoned themselves to. The unleashing of sexual passions is total, a lack of inhibition stamped with bestiality, animality...You can hardly avoid associating the dominant red of Picasso's signature with the red nail polish of Jacqueline, the companion of his final years" (Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic, New York, 2005, pp. 29-30).
Throughout his late eighties and early nineties, Picasso remained as sharp and prolific as ever, producing hundreds of paintings, drawings and engravings between 1968 and 1972 alone. This sheet exemplifies one of the artist's greatest preoccupations in the final decade of his career: brightly colored, rapidly executed line drawings depicting young lovers. Erotic fervor was an ideal analogy for Picasso's passion for his art; as his biographer John Richardson later wrote: "Picasso's sexual powers may have waned....but sex was still very much on his mind. 'We [Picasso and his wife Jacqueline] don't do it anymore, but the desire is still with us,' he told Brassaï. To compensate for his loss of libido, Picasso came to see sex and art, the brothel and the studio, as metaphors for each other—the sexual act standing for the creative act, and vice-versa. Hence the explicitly erotic nature of so many of these late drawings" (Cavaliers and Courtesans: A Collection of Picasso Master Drawings, Christie's, New York, November 1998, p. 7).
This romantic coupling is not soft or gentle; instead, it is a shockingly physical encounter. The artist's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier-Picasso, wrote of his late works, "These are not embraces but wrestling matches the sexes have abandoned themselves to. The unleashing of sexual passions is total, a lack of inhibition stamped with bestiality, animality...You can hardly avoid associating the dominant red of Picasso's signature with the red nail polish of Jacqueline, the companion of his final years" (Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic, New York, 2005, pp. 29-30).