Painted in 1965 at Picasso’s villa, Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, Modèle dans l’atelier is a powerful expression of one of the artist’s most important subjects: the artist and his model. Characterised by Picasso’s usual great spontaneity in brushwork and coloration, and an extraordinary creative energy, the present composition portrays a nude woman seated cross-legged, gazing directly at the viewer, with an easel beside her bearing the faint outlines of a canvas-in-progress. Although Picasso does not depict himself, his presence is strongly implied. The blank canvas stands in as a surrogate for his creative force, transforming the studio into a theatre of desire, creation, and memory.
“Picasso painted, drew and etched this subject so many times in his life that, as Michel Leiris has remarked, it almost became a genre in itself like landscape or still-life.”
Modèle dans l’atelier belongs to a broader series of paintings from spring 1965, in which Picasso revisited the artist-model motif with renewed intensity. As in many phases of his career, Picasso’s art remained deeply intertwined with his personal life, with the women in his paintings often reflecting his romantic relationships. In this work, the female figure is inspired by Jacqueline, the final great love of his life, whom he married in 1961. During this period, painting Jacqueline’s body became an expression of both erotic longing and reverence, shaped by Picasso’s advancing age and the tension between persistent desire and physical limitation. The present work is imbued with a characteristic sense of seduction, suggested by the model’s alluring pose and the playful, romantic hues of the emphatic colour palette. As Marie-Laure Bernadac observed, “the more Picasso painted this theme, the more he pushed the artist-model relationship towards its ultimate conclusion: the artist embraces his model, cancelling out the barrier of the canvas and transforming the artist-model relationship into a man-woman relationship. Painting is an act of love” (ibid., p. 77).
"It is characteristic of Picasso, in contrast to Matisse and many other twentieth-century painters, that he takes as his model—or as his Muse—the woman he loves and who lives with him, not a professional model. So what his paintings show is never a 'model' of a woman, but a woman as model. That has its consequences for his emotional as well as his artistic life: for the beloved woman stands for 'painting,' and the painted woman is the beloved: detachment is an impossibility. Picasso never paints from life: Jacqueline never posed for him; but she is there always, everywhere. All the women of these years are Jacqueline, and yet they are rarely portraits"
Whereas earlier paintings of the artist and his model depicted the actual figure of the painter—who almost exclusively occupied the left side of the composition, with the nude model on the right—in Modèle dans l’atelier, the painter is no longer visually present, replaced instead by a blank canvas on an easel. The model remains on the right, yet the artist’s gaze, desire, and energy still permeate the scene. Paradoxically, this absence amplifies the model’s presence. She commands the pictorial space with striking sensuality, rendered in bold, expressive brushstrokes that elevate her to a quasi-sacred status—an almost Madonna-like figure transfigured through paint. While Picasso seldom painted Jacqueline from life, this work represents an idealised vision of the studio: a poetic construction shaped by memory, fantasy, and aesthetic aspiration. Here, the studio transcends its role as a mere place of artistic production; it becomes a space where sensuality, spirituality, and creativity seamlessly coalesce.
In this emblematic series, Picasso also pays tribute to the vocation of the painter. Approaching the end of his life, he devoted much of his output throughout the 1960s to reinterpreting the old masters—studying closely the works of Rembrandt, Velázquez, and El Greco—to reaffirm his place in the canon of art history. The ageing artist thus returns to the essence of his craft: painting from the live model. With its allusions to artistic tradition and dynamic execution, Modèle dans l’atelier serves as a poignant reflection of Picasso’s awareness of the rich history behind him, as well as a testament to an artist’s tireless drive for creative innovation.
For Picasso, painting was as instinctive and essential as breathing—an act of personal revelation. As he once told Françoise Gilot, “I paint the same way some people write their autobiography” (ibid., p. 28). In this light, works such as Modèle dans l’atelier and Le Peintre et son modèle transcend their immediate subjects to become meditations on love, memory, creation, and mortality. Through the sensual figure of the model, Picasso stages the complex dynamic between artist and muse, transforming her into both object of desire and symbol of the artistic vitality that defined his late work.