Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Sale: Sotheby's, London, March 30, 1982, lot 44
Sale: Sotheby's, London, March 20, 1996, lot 67
Helly Nehmad Gallery, London
Private Collection, Spain

Picasso treated the subject of artist and model hundreds of times throughout his career, and as Michel Leiris has remarked, it has become a genre in itself, like landscape or still-life painting.  In the mid-1960s, Picasso painted almost nothing else.  Commenting on the development of Picasso's iconography after 1963 Marie-Laure Bernadec noted, "It is characteristic of Picasso, in contrast to Matisse and many other twentieth-century painters, that he takes as his model- or as his Muse- the woman he loves and who lives with him, not a professional model.  So what his paintings show is never a 'model' of a woman, but a woman as model.  That has its consequences for his emotional as well as his artistic life:  for the beloved woman stands for 'painting,' and the painted woman is the beloved:  detachment is an impossibility.  Picasso never paints from life:  Jacqueline never posed for him; but she is there always, everywhere.  All the women of these years are Jacqueline, and yet they are rarely portraist" (Marie-Laure Bernadec, Late Picasso, (exhibition catalogue) , London, 1988, p. 78).

Fig. 1  Picasso and Jacqueline Roque, 1955.  Photograph by Man Ray