Pablo Picasso

Estate of the artist
Claude Picasso, Paris
The Pace Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above on February 18, 1987 and sold: Christie's, New York, May 12, 1998, lot 50)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Avignon, Palais de Papes, Picasso en Avignon, 1973, no. 160
New York, The Pace Gallery, Picasso: The Avignon Paintings, 1981, no. 43 (titled Femme nue)

Rafael Alberti, Picasso: le rayon interrompu, Paris, 1974, no. 162, illustrated p. 237
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1971 à 1972, vol. 33, Paris, 1978, no. 289, illustrated pl. 100
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Final Years 1970-1973, San Francisco, 2004, no. 72-024, illustrated p. 273

Like most of Picasso’s late paintings, Nu has its origin in the subject of painter and his model.  Even when he does not include the image of the artist, as is the case in the present work, his presence is strongly felt.  In his paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, the theme of a female nude enabled Picasso to explore the essence of painting, and to establish a relationship between the creator, his model and the canvas.  In Nu, the image of the woman, frontally positioned and facing the viewer, fills almost the entire area of the canvas with a forceful presence.  By depicting her as a powerful character, Picasso reverses the traditional relationship between the painter and his model: rather than subjecting the woman to his all-powerful gaze, the artist becomes the object of her powerful presence.

 

Writing about Picasso’s nudes from this period, Marie-Laure Bernadac commented:  “In the paintings of these last years the women remain young and attractive; they are conceited and sometimes comical; they have massive, well-rounded forms and colossal proportions […]  Picasso is the painter of women: goddess of antiquity, mother, praying mantis, blown-up balloon, weeper, hysteric, body curled in a ball or sprawled in sleep, pile of available flesh, cheerful pisser, fruitful mother or courtesan: no painter has ever gone so far in unveiling the feminine universe in all the complexity of its real and fantasy life.  This intimate, passionate awareness is a constant source of renewal for his painting, which revels in the variety of the repertoire of forms that it affords, mineral and carnal by turns.  He thus works with an infinite range of possibilities that make all metamorphoses possible.  A woman’s body is the obstacle on to which he projects his male desire and his creative energy.  The gap between art and reality, and the irremediable distance between man and woman, enable him to keep up the tension.  Picasso’s obsessive theme of the artist and his model now undergoes a metamorphosis into an erotic relationship, and this stimulates an extraordinarily prolific period of work which marks the rise of a new painting (Marie-Laure Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model," Late Picasso (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 80).