In 1927 Picasso met a young woman outside the Galeries Lafayette; her name was Marie-Thérèse Walter and she would soon become his lover and most important muse. Over the decade that followed she inspired paintings, drawings and sculptures many of which remain among the best of his career. Dating from 1931, Femme endormie belongs to this body of work and is a particularly tender and intimate portrait of Picasso’s lover.

Describing the moment she met Picasso years later, Walter recalled: ‘I was an innocent girl. I knew nothing - either of life or of Picasso [...]. I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, “I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together”’ (quoted in Picasso and the Weeping Women (exhibition catalogue), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles & The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994, p. 143). Picasso at this time was still in an increasingly unhappy marriage to Olga Khokhlova and his relationship with Marie-Thérèse had by necessity to remain a secret, hidden even from his inner circle of friends.

Despite the hidden nature of their relationship, Marie-Thérèse’s distinctive features began appearing in Picasso’s work almost as soon as he had met her. As the years passed her presence in his art became more pervasive; she inspired a period of renewed creative intensity. As Patrick McCaughey observed: ‘Marie-Thérèse embodied for Picasso an ideal type – love, model and goddess. She offered him a release into sensuality and inspired the series of reclining, sleeping nudes of the early 1930s. Through Marie-Thérèse, Picasso discovered a new amplitude of form; less solemn than the monumental neo-classical nudes of the 1920s and with a promise of abundance and pleasure. She was also the model for an extensive series of large sculpted heads which progressively became more Sibyl-like – an image of eternal womanhood’ (P. McCaughey in Picasso (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne & Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1984, p. 211).

In 1930 Picasso acquired the eighteenth-century Château de Boisgeloup and built a studio there. Boisgeloup had singular importance for the artist during these years; it enabled him to experiment in new ways, installing a printing press and working on the series of monumental sculpted heads that were also inspired by Marie-Thérèse. It also allowed him more easily to split his time between his wife and family life and his exciting new existence with Marie-Thérèse. This arrangement appears to have worked remarkably well and the identity of his young lover would remain secret until 1932 when Picasso included a series of portraits of Marie-Thérèse in his retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit.

Femme endormie – painted just over a year before this exhibition – belongs very much among the works that celebrate the intimate and secret aspect of their early relationship. Picasso often depicted Marie-Thérèse asleep or reading as though to emphasise his proximity to her. Roland Penrose described the key characteristics of these pictures: ‘Most of these figures painted with flowing curves lie sleeping, their arms folded round their heads [...]. The sleeper's breasts are round and fruitlike and her hands finish like the blades of summer grass. The profile of the face, usually with closed eyes, is drawn in one bold curve uniting forehead and nose above thick sensuous lips’ (R. Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 243).

In Femme endormie Marie-Thérèse is depicted close up with only her arms and face visible; her body is just hinted at by lines that curve sensuously off the canvas but there is a latent eroticism in this withholding. Picasso’s biographer John Richardson observed: ‘Marie-Thérèse loved to sleep and Picasso loved to paint her asleep […]. By portraying Marie-Thérèse’s splayed body from the viewpoint of a sexual partner, Picasso draws us into his lovemaking’ (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume III 1917-1932, London, 2007, p. 330). Here there is none of the violent eroticism seen elsewhere in Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse, rather there is a touching sensitivity to the portrayal. Marie-Thérèse is shown on the very edge of sleep; her eyes remain slightly open but she is absorbed in her own thoughts. Picasso once said, ‘When a man watches a woman asleep, he tries to understand’ (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881-1906, New York, 1991, p. 317) and there is something elusive about her attitude in this work that suggests a moment too private to be shared.

This effect is emphasised by Picasso’s choice of medium, working with charcoal directly onto primed canvas. The softness of the black lines accentuates her sensuality and highlights the voluptuous curves that first attracted Picasso. The use of this transient medium also adds an immediacy that reinforces the sense that we are privileged witnesses to a fleeting moment between two lovers. Carmen Giménez theorized that Picasso ‘really didn’t care about the colour. He cared about the form and the structure of the painting. He wanted to express himself the best way possible […]. He has the power to bring you into his field without using colour, because he’s a master drawer. The line is what’s powerful in his work’ (Anthony Barzilay Freund, ‘Carmen Giménez on “Picasso Black and White” at the Guggenheim’, Sotheby's at Auction, 9th October 2012). That is certainly true of the present work, where the monochrome palette emphasises the surety of Picasso’s line, the absolute certainty with which he set down his lover’s features.

Much has been made of Marie-Thérèse’s submissiveness, her docile personality, her youth; yet there was something about her that was impervious to Picasso’s dominating spirit. She once said, ‘Il faut savoir être gentille’ – you have to be kind – and this kindness evidently drew something out of him; there is a gentleness to this work that is rarely seen in his other portraits. Her features are not abstracted, her form does not disintegrate, instead we see her absolutely as Picasso did, sitting by her side while she fell asleep. He kept this work all his life, perhaps because he acknowledged its very intimate and personal nature. Perhaps too it reminded him in equal parts both of the extraordinary creative energy that Marie-Thérèse inspired in him and of the moments they shared together at the very height of their love.

Impressionist & Modern Art

The European Avant-Garde: A Private Family Collection