Executed only two months after Pablo Picasso completed his Matador series in October 1970, Nu debout et deux tetê d'hommes is testament to the artist’s continued preoccupation with mortality and identity in his mature years. The present work is a culmination of the two chief themes that dominated his later works: that of the painter and the model and that of the matador and the musketeer. The confident strokes and expressive rendering of the figures in Nu debout et deux tetê d'hommes attest to Picasso’s spontaneity as well as his unrelenting creative output.

In the present work, the youthful and virile faces, with their unruly locks and moustaches, are reminiscent of the matador and musketeer motifs that had come to the forefront of his œuvre from the mid-sixties, and which he continued to build upon in later years. For Picasso these motifs allowed him to project different aspects of his own identity. Art historian M-L Bernadac has argued that in the artist’s later works the subject ‘always plays a part or wears a disguise: as a painter at work or as a matador-musketeer […] Picasso’s confrontation with the human face, which makes him a great portrait-painter of the twentieth century, brings him back to a confrontation with himself, the painter, young or old.’ (M.-L. Bernadac, in Late Picasso, (exh. cat.), The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, pp. 81-3). In Nu debout et deux tetê d'hommes this multifaceted identity is consolidated compositionally. Two faces are depicted: both are in costume, one confronts the viewer, the other looks to the nude, and remains partially hidden by his hair and hand showcasing the complex view that the artist had of himself and the legacy he intended to leave behind.

These (self-)portraits crystallised Picasso’s iconography and personal mythology as he incorporated himself into Western tradition and portraiture. The musketeer-matador referenced Rembrandt and Goya, as well as other Dutch and Spanish Masters whom Picasso sought to situate himself alongside. Looking at the present work, Picasso has drawn on elements of Rembrandt’s own self-portraits, the linear elements evoking the etchings he likely absorbed through numerous museum visits throughout his life and it is possible in the arrangement of Nu debout et deux tetê d'hommes to see similarities with the two central figures in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

Although numerous elements in the present work convey Picasso looking to the past and his predecessors as sources for his own artistic production, this work is nonetheless imbued with a sense of vitality and innovation. Indeed, the present work is a reinvention of the ‘painter and his model’, a key theme in Picasso’s work which, as determined by Michel Leiris, became a genre in its own right. In Nu debout et deux tetê d'hommes typical attributes of the genre are missing – the paintbrush, easel, palette or studio – nonetheless, the relationship between the nude and the artist remains, and is further underscored by the compositional divide in the work.

In this way, Picasso redefines his genre: in the present work the relationship is removed from the studio context, heightening the sensual nature of the encounter. The woman's coyness paired with the man's fixated gaze underscores the suggestive relationship between the artist and muse, which remained at the heart of Picasso's oeuvre throughout his career. Nu debout et deux tetê d'hommes is testament to the artist’s relentless ambition to reinvent his artistic production and identity. Faced with his own mortality and age, Picasso instead endeavoured to redefine his identity with a visual lexicon of sensuality, vigour, and virility.