Nu

Pablo Picasso’s Nu, executed in November 1971, bears testimony to his complete mastery of line and form and to the extraordinary passion the artist continued to exert towards the final years of his towering career. At the time, Picasso was living in near total seclusion with his wife, Jacqueline Roque, at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a spacious and isolated farmhouse nestled in the lush hills of Mougins in the South of France. Here, he immersed himself fully in his work, painting and drawing unremittingly for hours on end. As acute and prolific in his nineties as ever, Picasso continued to approach his art with an unwavering sense of playful spontaneity, distilling the contours of his figures to their most elemental forms and confidently rendering his unique vision onto paper and canvas.

The present work is likely a tribute to his second wife Jacqueline, who, though never formally acknowledged as the artist’s sitter, nevertheless captivated his imagination— her likenesses populating his work more than any other of his celebrated muses. The two met in 1952, when Jacqueline was working at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, where Picasso had been making his iconic ceramics. In the last decades of his life, Jacqueline came to embody the very concept of feminine sensuality. In fact, her presence defined his late work to such an extent that his biographer, John Richardson, characterised his last great years as ‘l’epoque Jacqueline’. Picasso was captivated by Jacqueline’s classic features: her dominant eyebrows, wide eyes, curved mouth, aquiline nose, and dark hair— and his fascination is evident in his late artworks.

The breadth and quality of Picasso’s works in his final years evidences not only his indefatigable, mercurial creativity, but also a conscious reckoning with his artistic past, as reflected in the many styles, techniques, and subjects that informed his unrivalled career. The reclining female nude, one of the abiding motifs in the long history of western art, was an endless source of inspiration for Picasso, and a fruitful subject for experimentation over the course of his artistic development. Following his predilection for self-quotation, his late works often alluded to earlier ones. The present figure’s pose, with both arms bent suggestively behind her head, evokes the central figure of the succès de scandale that was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, created more than sixty years before, in 1907. Here, however, the gaze is not the taciturn, confrontational glare of the earlier work; instead, the figure lies in serene, languid repose with a brazen complicity playing in her eyes, brows and economically drawn mouth. Explicit in its sensuality, there is also an echo of Gustave Courbet’s infamous and provocative L’origine du monde (1866), and implicitly, a demonstration of the huge leap forward that Picasso’s body of work stimulated.

Beyond the female form per se, Picasso’s late nudes manifest a preoccupation with the relationship between the artist and model— a theme that runs throughout his entire œuvre and to which he returned in his final years. Typically depicted alongside the artist, armed with his props of palette, brush, and canvas, the model sits or reclines, inviting both the viewer and the artist to contemplate her form. After emphasising the painter in a series of portraits, it was natural that Picasso should turn his focus back onto the model herself, exploring a degree of intimacy between them that in turn draws the viewer into closer communion with the subject.

As in the late style of many great masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, or Cezanne, Picasso’s later works exhibit a determination to eschew complexity and to embrace a distillation of the artistic lifework’s vision, to focus on the expressiveness of fundamental figurative form. Thus, the lines here are fluid and deft, and transparently true to his style, achieving a purity of articulation that is unmistakably Picasso.