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Lot Essay
During the final two decades of his career, Pablo Picasso produced a vast body of paintings, drawings, and prints centred on the theme of the artist and model. This subject was among the most persistent of his late period; increasingly preoccupied with it, Picasso used the subject to probe the mysteries of artistic creation, to parody both ageing and his own persona as a living Old Master, and, at a deeper level, to confront, and deny his own fear of death.
Marie-Laure Bernadac has further situated this imagery within Picasso’s broader late exploration of painting itself. In her words, ‘in the last twenty years of his life, Picasso literally took painting as his model…all the works of this period have to do with a single theme, that of painter and model’, through which he examined the dynamics of creation - artist, model, and canvas - as subject, object, and verb (M.-L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953–1972: Painting as Model’, in Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 49).
In June and July 1970, Picasso returned to the artist and model theme with renewed intensity, producing a substantial group of drawings. More than half of the nearly two hundred works shown at the Galerie Louis Leiris in 1971, representing the majority of drawings executed between December 1969 and January 1971, were devoted to this subject. Drawn on 30 June 1970, the present sheet belongs to the height of this intensely productive moment and is one of two works executed on that day.
In such compositions, Picasso casts the artist as both creator and voyeur, observed in the act of painting a sleeping nude model. The emphasis lies not on the finished work but on the process itself, inviting the viewer into the act of creation. As in many examples, the painter may be read as a self-projection, almost certainly intended as Picasso, though here rendered as a younger figure. Notably, this persona remains partly fictional: Picasso rarely used a palette, preferring newspaper, seldom worked from posed models, and infrequently employed an easel.
Christopher Lloyd has similarly emphasised the vitality of the 1970 drawings, describing them as ‘varied and inventive’, with broader handling and heightened intimacy, drawing the viewer into closer proximity with the figures. At their core lies the tension between art and reality, embodied in the relationship between artist and model - a theme Picasso pursued in conscious dialogue with the great painters of the past, among whom he sought to position himself (C. Lloyd, Picasso and the Art of Drawing, London, 2018, pp. 190–191). The reclining nude further recalls the odalisque tradition, aligning these works with the legacy of Titian, Velázquez, Ingres and Delacroix, artists with whom Picasso maintained a lifelong dialogue. Here, however, the motif is reconfigured: less an exoticised object than a catalyst for examining the act of painting itself, reinforcing Picasso’s self-conscious positioning within the Old Master tradition.
The extraordinary inventiveness of these drawings is evident in their compositional variety, even among works executed on the same day. A sequence of eight drawings of The Artist and his Model, all dated 4 July 1970 and now in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, retains a consistent spatial arrangement while varying the physiognomy of the artist, the pose of the model, and the psychological interplay between them.
Executed just three years before Picasso’s death, the present sheet attests to the undiminished vigour of his draughtsmanship at the age of eighty-nine. Created whilst his major exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon was on view, it reflects his continued engagement with a theme that had occupied him since circa 1963, one to which he would only rarely return in the final years of his life.
Marie-Laure Bernadac has further situated this imagery within Picasso’s broader late exploration of painting itself. In her words, ‘in the last twenty years of his life, Picasso literally took painting as his model…all the works of this period have to do with a single theme, that of painter and model’, through which he examined the dynamics of creation - artist, model, and canvas - as subject, object, and verb (M.-L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953–1972: Painting as Model’, in Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 49).
In June and July 1970, Picasso returned to the artist and model theme with renewed intensity, producing a substantial group of drawings. More than half of the nearly two hundred works shown at the Galerie Louis Leiris in 1971, representing the majority of drawings executed between December 1969 and January 1971, were devoted to this subject. Drawn on 30 June 1970, the present sheet belongs to the height of this intensely productive moment and is one of two works executed on that day.
In such compositions, Picasso casts the artist as both creator and voyeur, observed in the act of painting a sleeping nude model. The emphasis lies not on the finished work but on the process itself, inviting the viewer into the act of creation. As in many examples, the painter may be read as a self-projection, almost certainly intended as Picasso, though here rendered as a younger figure. Notably, this persona remains partly fictional: Picasso rarely used a palette, preferring newspaper, seldom worked from posed models, and infrequently employed an easel.
Christopher Lloyd has similarly emphasised the vitality of the 1970 drawings, describing them as ‘varied and inventive’, with broader handling and heightened intimacy, drawing the viewer into closer proximity with the figures. At their core lies the tension between art and reality, embodied in the relationship between artist and model - a theme Picasso pursued in conscious dialogue with the great painters of the past, among whom he sought to position himself (C. Lloyd, Picasso and the Art of Drawing, London, 2018, pp. 190–191). The reclining nude further recalls the odalisque tradition, aligning these works with the legacy of Titian, Velázquez, Ingres and Delacroix, artists with whom Picasso maintained a lifelong dialogue. Here, however, the motif is reconfigured: less an exoticised object than a catalyst for examining the act of painting itself, reinforcing Picasso’s self-conscious positioning within the Old Master tradition.
The extraordinary inventiveness of these drawings is evident in their compositional variety, even among works executed on the same day. A sequence of eight drawings of The Artist and his Model, all dated 4 July 1970 and now in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, retains a consistent spatial arrangement while varying the physiognomy of the artist, the pose of the model, and the psychological interplay between them.
Executed just three years before Picasso’s death, the present sheet attests to the undiminished vigour of his draughtsmanship at the age of eighty-nine. Created whilst his major exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon was on view, it reflects his continued engagement with a theme that had occupied him since circa 1963, one to which he would only rarely return in the final years of his life.