Pablo Picasso

Estate of the artist (no. 13432)

Marina Picasso (acquired from the above)

Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva

Acquired from the above on October 39, 1986

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1961 à 1962, Paris, 1968, vol. 20, no. 151, illustrated pl. 77

Jean Leymarie, Picasso: Artist of the Century, Geneva, 1972, illustrated p. 66

Hélène Parmelin, Picasso: Women, Cannes and Mougins, 1954-1963, Paris, n.d., illustrated p. 122

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, and Sculpture, The Sixties, I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 61-230, illustrated p. 183

Between 1959 and 1962, Picasso completed a series of oils, drawings, linoleum cuts, sculptures and ceramics inspired by Manet's seminal work of 1863, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Picasso’s early encounters with this picture were well documented: first in Paris in 1900 at the Universal Exposition, and later in 1907, while he was working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. As a young man, he was notably impressed with the iconoclasm and intelligence of Manet’s composition, and readily acknowledged that any artistic investigation of it would be a monumental undertaking on his part. He once noted to himself on the back of an envelope when encountering it at Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon in 1929, "When I see the Déjeuner sur l'herbe, I tell myself, trouble for later on." Indeed, it was not until half a century later that the artist would begin rendering variations of Manet’s masterwork. Among all the series of variations on the old masters that the artist completed during the 1950s and 1960s, this one was by far the most extensive and most time-consuming, occupying him at his three studios in Vauvenargues, Mougins and Notre Dame de Vence.

With regard to Picasso's involvement with this series, Carste-Peter Warncke has written, "Manet's famous painting, which shocked its 19th century audience and prompted a scandal when first exhibited, shows two naked or near-naked women with two clothed men in a country setting (see fig. 1). Manet had painted his work as something of a pastiche, drawing on Giorgione's Concert in the Country (in the Louvre) and a detail from a copper engraving by Raimondi after a design by Raphael. The figure group of Déjeuner had begun to interest Picasso in June 1954 because his own treatments of painters and models used a similar grouping. At that time he did a number of sketches after Manet (see fig. 2), returning at the end of the Fifties to more concentrated work on the material. He did variations on the composition of Déjeuner in oils, graphics and drawings, emphasizing the contrast between the female nudes and the male figures, which he subjected to greater or lesser degress of deconstruction (Carste-Peter Warncke, Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973, vol. II, Cologne, 1994, p. 579-580).

The present work is a reinterpretation of the central figure of Manet's composition, the nude. When Manet depicted his seated female figure - a portrait of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent - he dared to present her nudity with an unabashed candor that was highly uncharacteristic of the time. Picasso takes the figure's nudity to an even more confrontational level in the present picture, unfolding her body so that her torso and genital area are exposed. Like the original, this figure poses with the same bent knee and direct gaze, but the improbable contortions of her body abstract her form and identify her with a 20th century aesthetic.

Susan Grace Galassi has discussed the relationship between these two nudes, noting how Picasso has made this image distinctly his own: "For Picasso, as for Manet, the Déjeuner offered the opportunity to reassess the central theme of the nude and invest it with new life. Over the course of his transformations, he strips away Manet's overlay of realism, and takes the female figure back to something more timeless, enduring and primordial. The female nude was for Picasso, as it was in Manet's time, 'the very essence of art...its principle and its force, the mysterious armature that prevents its decomposition and dissolution.' She is equated with the originating impulse of art, eros, inspiration, and generativity, and is the link between generations" (Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso's Variations on the Masters, New York, 1996, p. 201).

Comparables:

Fig. 1, Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Etude pour Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (d'après Manet), Vallauris, June 29, 1954, Musée Picasso, Paris

Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (d'après Manet), Mougins, July 16, 1961, oil on canvas, Lucerne, Picasso Collection, Donation Rosengart