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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso made prints throughout his extraordinary, seven-decade-long career, but the 1930s were a particularly productive period for this medium, as he explored the formal possibilities of monotypes, dry point and etchings. In 1930, Picasso produced an etching depicting two nude bathers seated together in an intimate embrace, entitled Deux nu assis (Bloch 133; Baer 200). Picasso subsequently transformed this etching by adding several layers of white, purple, and light blue oil paint, concealing the nude on the right. The figure now sits alone, swathed in shades of violet and lavender. She leans one arm against her bent knee and caresses her calf with the other. The resulting image, Baigneuse au pouf rouge, is a unique object: a print that has come to life, metamorphosizing into a vibrantly-colored painting.
Of the six trial proofs extracted from the third state of the Deux nu assis etching, Picasso added paint on top of two. In one of those, Deux femmes—which is also featured in the current sale—Picasso used paint to preserve and emphasize the two titular subjects. In Baigneuse au pouf rouge, however, Picasso modified the composition to highlight only the bather on the left. He made several changes to this figure, wrapping her etched braid of hair in a painted marigold-yellow turban, narrowing her waist, and turning her head from a straight profile to a three-quarter view of her face.
In making these changes, Picasso invoked Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Neo-Classical masterpieces, La baigneuse de Valpinçon (1808, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and La grande odalisque (1814, Musée du Louvre, Paris), two of the most iconic female nudes from the history of art. In the earlier Ingres painting, a bather sits on a white cushion, wearing nothing but a striped turban; the pale, fleshy expanse of her back is the primary focus of the painting. In Baigneuse au pouf rouge, Picasso similarly offers us a view of the purple back of his own turbaned bather, but also of her breasts, as she twists her torso in order to meet the viewer’s gaze. In this impossible, contorted pose, Picasso likely also drew inspiration from Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, a reclining nude with an unnaturally elongated spine who turns to look over her shoulder towards the viewer, simultaneously concealing and revealing her nude anatomy.
Picasso created a large number of female bathers in different media between the late 1920s and early 1930s, including Baigneuse au pouf rouge. At this time, in his personal life Picasso was caught between two extremes: enraptured by his new muse and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter—whose youthful vitality and sensuous forms would unleash an outpouring of amorous nudes and portraits in his work—and the unhappiness caused by his rapidly deteriorating marriage to Olga Picasso. As a result, Picasso’s depictions of the female figure at this time are defined by the stylistic extremes of Classicism and a biomorphic form of Cubism, in which bodies are distorted and deconstructed. In the present painting, Picasso has adopted the pastel palette and undulating line that would come to define his now-famed depictions of Marie-Thérèse that he began in 1931-1932, her presence infusing his art with a new sense of color and life.
Of the six trial proofs extracted from the third state of the Deux nu assis etching, Picasso added paint on top of two. In one of those, Deux femmes—which is also featured in the current sale—Picasso used paint to preserve and emphasize the two titular subjects. In Baigneuse au pouf rouge, however, Picasso modified the composition to highlight only the bather on the left. He made several changes to this figure, wrapping her etched braid of hair in a painted marigold-yellow turban, narrowing her waist, and turning her head from a straight profile to a three-quarter view of her face.
In making these changes, Picasso invoked Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Neo-Classical masterpieces, La baigneuse de Valpinçon (1808, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and La grande odalisque (1814, Musée du Louvre, Paris), two of the most iconic female nudes from the history of art. In the earlier Ingres painting, a bather sits on a white cushion, wearing nothing but a striped turban; the pale, fleshy expanse of her back is the primary focus of the painting. In Baigneuse au pouf rouge, Picasso similarly offers us a view of the purple back of his own turbaned bather, but also of her breasts, as she twists her torso in order to meet the viewer’s gaze. In this impossible, contorted pose, Picasso likely also drew inspiration from Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, a reclining nude with an unnaturally elongated spine who turns to look over her shoulder towards the viewer, simultaneously concealing and revealing her nude anatomy.
Picasso created a large number of female bathers in different media between the late 1920s and early 1930s, including Baigneuse au pouf rouge. At this time, in his personal life Picasso was caught between two extremes: enraptured by his new muse and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter—whose youthful vitality and sensuous forms would unleash an outpouring of amorous nudes and portraits in his work—and the unhappiness caused by his rapidly deteriorating marriage to Olga Picasso. As a result, Picasso’s depictions of the female figure at this time are defined by the stylistic extremes of Classicism and a biomorphic form of Cubism, in which bodies are distorted and deconstructed. In the present painting, Picasso has adopted the pastel palette and undulating line that would come to define his now-famed depictions of Marie-Thérèse that he began in 1931-1932, her presence infusing his art with a new sense of color and life.