Pablo Picasso

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1967 et 1968, Paris, 1973, vol. 27, no. 72, illustrated pl. 22
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 67-285, illustrated p. 368

Like most of Picasso’s late paintings, Nu assis has its origin in the subject of painter and his model.  In the present work the female model is characterized by a great spontaneity in brushwork and an extraordinary creative energy.  This seductive female nude is brought to the foreground occupying the whole of the painted surface creating erotic tension between the viewer and herself.

The motif of the female nude fascinated Picasso throughout his career, and in the present work the woman’s body creates a sculptural presence.  In various periods of his work, Picasso’s art was closely related to his personal life, and the women depicted in his paintings were always influenced by his female companions at the time.  In Nu assis, the female figure is inspired by Jacqueline, the last love of his life, whom Picasso married in 1961.  Although the depicted nude is not a direct likeness of Jacqueline, her long hair suggests it is a portrait of the artist’s last muse.  The essence of Jacqueline, who never posed as Picasso’s model, is always present in his portraits of the period, as in the present work.

In his discussion of Picasso’s late works, David Sylvester links them to his early masterpiece, Demoiselles d’Avignon, both distinguished by the “raw vitality” which they have as their central underlying theme, “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 favour 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.” (David Sylvester, Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 144)