Painted in 1960, when Picasso was seventy-nine, Nu assis belongs to an important group of works from the artist’s so-called ‘late period’. Characterised by a raw energy, gestural application of paint and recourse to archetypal subject matter, these paintings have experienced a significant critical reappraisal over the past few decades and are now rightly seen as the final flourish of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
The enigmatic female nude at the centre of this composition was, as in the majority of his late portraits, inspired by the ever-present figure of Jacqueline. Picasso’s representations of Jacqueline constitute the largest group of images of any of the women in his life, and these final years of his career have been fittingly termed “l’époque Jacqueline”. The couple first met in 1952 at the pottery studio in Vallauris, where Picasso was working on his ceramics, while he was still living with the mother of his two children, Françoise Gilot. By 1954, Françoise had left, and Jacqueline’s unmistakable angular profile and raven hair began to appear in Picasso’s paintings. Jacqueline reportedly never posed for the artist, but his wild imagination provided bountiful situational and stylistic modes from throughout the artistic canon for his muse, whose appearance he believed could embody any woman and all women.
As Estrella de Diego describes: “Jacqueline appeared at a perfect moment in the life of Picasso, an older man who was beginning to be overwhelmed by many things, from his family life to his success, as [Roland] Penrose explained. And as a result of a casual encounter, which recalls that between Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal, a shop assistant before she posed for the English artist, Jacqueline came to embody – from the abstract to the concrete, from portraits to representations of the essence of woman – each and every one of the characters Picasso needed, as he had always done in the past, to activate the pictorial formulae that corresponded to his enduring obsessions” (E. de Diego in Exh. Cat., Málaga, Museo Picasso, Picasso, Musas y Modelos, 2006, p. 30).
Centre: Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme assise, 1960, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024
Right: Fig. 4, Pablo Picasso, Femme assise aux mains jointes, 4 December 1960, oil on canvas, Sprengel Museum, Hannover © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024
Over the course of 1960 Picasso would turn to her as subject on numerous occasions, creating a group of portraits that share the same palette predominated by tones of grey, black and ochre (figs. 2-4). At the time Picasso and Jacqueline were living at the Château de Vauvenargues near Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence which was their home between 1959-62. Perhaps the proximity to this Cézannian landscape predicated the shift from the brighter colours of the late 1950s to this subtler mode. Certainly, there is a sensitivity to sculptural form and tonal contrasts in this group of paintings that shares an affinity with Cézanne’s body of portraiture (fig. 5).
Indeed, this period saw Picasso consistently evoking the great artists of the past in his own art; painting works inspired by Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt van Rijn, El Greco and Francisco Goya (fig. 6). This focus on the Old Masters was a pointed affirmation of his place in the revered lineage of the great figures within art historical canon. Works such as the 1962 Femme au chien (fig. 7) show Picasso deliberately evoking the traditional portrait format of a seated woman surrounded by the accoutrements of her life. Nu assis shows him summoning a parallel artistic tradition - that of the female nude - and through an energetic, scrawling application of paint imbuing it with an expressive immediacy.
Right: Fig. 7, PABLO PICASSO, FEMME AU CHIEN, OIL ON CANVAS, 1962, SOLD: SOTHEBY’S NEW YORK, MAY 2019, $54.9 million © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024
In his discussion of Picasso's late works, David Sylvester identifies this “raw vitality” as linking them to the early masterpiece, Demoiselles d'Avignon: "The resemblance of figures in the Demoiselles and in late Picasso to masked tribal dancers is as crucial as their scale in giving them a threatening force. It is irrelevant whether or not particular faces or bodies are based on particular tribal models: what matters is the air these personages have of coming from a world more primitive, possibly more cannibalistic and certainly more elemental than ours. Despite the rich assortment of allusions to paintings in the Renaissance tradition, the treatment of space rejects that tradition in favor of an earlier one, the flat unperspectival space of, say, medieval Catalan frescoes... At twenty-five, Picasso's raw vitality was already being enriched by the beginnings of an encyclopaedic awareness of art; at ninety, his encyclopaedic awareness of art was still being enlivened by a raw vitality" (D. Sylvester, in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1953-1972, 1988, p. 144).
"The surface of the late paintings has a freedom, a plasticity, that was never there before; they are more spontaneous, more expressive and more instinctive than virtually all his previous work."
This vitality is an essential part of these late works. In Nu assis the paint is applied with frenzied energy, scrawled in sgraffito gestures, scumbled and worked to create a tactile surface. The splashes of colour – blue, red, green – serve as focal points that emphasise the hieratic frontality of the figure. Picasso contrasts the strong, angular lines of her face with softer curves conjuring both seriousness and sensuality. The result is a portrait of immense expression and vigour – one that underlines the powerful impact of Picasso’s work in the final decades of his life.
