Pablo Picasso

The nude at her toilette is a key theme in Picasso's works of 1905 and 1906. These works trace his stylistic evolution during a pivotal phase of transition, away from the sentimentality of the Rose Period and culminating in his 1907 masterpiece, Demoiselles d'Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Etude pour 'La Coiffure' is a previously unrecorded example, executed in Paris or in Gósol in the Catalan Pyrenées. It relates to a series of studies for La Coiffure, Picasso's terracotta sculpture of that year (see: Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Œuvres de 1895 à 1906, Paris, 1957, vol. I, no. 329). A drawing now in the Sainsbury Collection in Norwich is a close variant, where the model is shown fully kneeling (C. Zervos, op. cit., no. 341).

Picasso's nudes from Gósol, where he and Fernande spent the summer of 1906, become increasingly intimate and abstracted, their gestures ambiguous. References to classical and Iberian sculpture abound, and faces turn into masks in anticipation of Demoiselles d'Avignon. The face in the La Coiffure studies, as Nuria Rivero and Teresa Llorens have noted, 'reflects the most recent stylistic innovations which are reduced to essential features; however, the flexibility of the hair, and the softer outlines of the body, less monumental, give these works a gracefulness highly unusual for the period' (N. Rivero and T. Llorens in Picasso 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol (exhibition catalogue), Museu Picasso, Barcelona & Kunstmuseum, Bern, 1992, p. 372).

The present work has a fascinating provenance. In 1936, it was received by Barbara Bagenal as a gift from her admirer, Saxon Sydney-Turner, who had purchased it from the legendary Zwemmer Gallery in London. Barbara, an artist herself and wife of Nicholas Bagenal, moved in Bloomsbury circles with Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

Picasso had originally left the drawing unsigned but, as a 1958 note from Clive Bell attached to the backboard explains: 'On February 1958 I took Mrs Bagenal to lunch with Picasso [in Cannes]. Madame Roque, Picasso, Mr Duncan and his wife made up the party. I spoke of the drawing. [...] On seeing it Picasso exclaimed "Dieu que c'est beau". He confirmed the date (1905) and signed the drawing with his 1958 signature. "That will be a puzzle for art-historians some day", said he. To save art-historians trouble I have written this note'.

FIG. I, Pablo Picasso, Jeune femme nue a la chevelure, 1905, oil on canvas, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris