Pablo Picasso

Throughout November 1964, Picasso executed a series of paintings, including the present work, on the theme of the painter and his model, one of the great recurring motifs of his œuvre. ‘Picasso painted, drew and etched this subject so many times in his life that, as Michel Leiris has remarked, it almost became a genre in itself like landscape or still-life. In 1963 and 1964 he painted almost nothing else: the painter armed with his attributes, palette and brushes, the canvas on an easel, mostly seen from the side, like a screen and the nude model, seated or reclining, in a space which presents all the characteristics of an artist’s studio: the big window, the sculpture on a stool, the folding screen the lamp, the divan, etc. All these stage props have nothing to do with Picasso’s real situation; he always painted without a palette and without an easel, directly onto a canvas laid flat. This is therefore not so much a record of his own work as an ‘epitome’ of a profession’ (Marie-Laure Bernadac, Late Picasso, London, 1988, p. 74).

Throughout this series of large canvases, the figure of the painter almost exclusively occupies the left-hand side of the composition, while the nude female model occupies the right half. Never tiring of exploring visual means of depicting erotic tension, in the years to follow Picasso developed a number of variations on this theme, always characterised by a great spontaneity in brushwork and colouration, and an extraordinary creative energy. Whilst in the later variations of this theme men and women are seen in various costumes and performing various activities, such as musicians (fig. 2) or musketeers (fig. 3), in the 1964 series the protagonists are unmistakably the artist himself and the model he is painting, often divided by the vertical line of the easel between them (fig. 4). However, rather than dedicated solely to the process of painting and modelling, the two figures are involved in the game of seduction, with the artist’s brushes wittily suggestive of the man’s desire for his female object, and of erotic tension between them.

The motif of the female nude fascinated Picasso throughout his career, and in the present work he leaves the details of her face unfinished, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on other parts of her anatomy. 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 Picasso’s female companions at the time. In Le Peintre et son modèle, the female figure is inspired by Jacqueline, the last love of his life, whom Picasso married in 1961, and although she is not a direct likeness of Jacqueline, with her characteristic hair style, she bears the features with which Picasso usually portrayed his 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' (D. Sylvester, Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 144).

Fig. 1, A photograph of Picasso at Mougins, showing the present work on the right, behind the artist
Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Nu couché et homme jouant de la guitarre, 1970, oil on canvas, Musée Picasso, Paris
Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, Nu debout et mousquetaire assis, 1968, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig. 4, Pablo Picasso, Le Peintre et son modèle, 1963, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid