Pablo Picasso

Sale: Karl & Faber, Munich, 4th December 1996, lot 735
Acquired by the present owner circa 1999

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Picasso and his Work 1900-1932, 1966-1967, no. 10

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Supplément aux années 1903-1906, Paris, 1970, vol. 22, no. 420, illustrated pl. 148

This work was probably executed in the summer of 1906 during Picasso and Fernande's sojourn in the Spanish town of Gósol. Here, the artist found the peace and quiet in which to concentrate on experimenting in his work. He did a series of paintings and studies of women doing their hair, most notably La Toilette, now in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo and Le Harem in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Although the women in these pictures suggest that Fernande was his model, the elongated limbs and upstretched arms entwined in hair have a striking similarity to Ingres' Odalisques, and in particular the Vénus Anadyomene in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
In the present work, the elongated, angular forms of the nude standing in contraposto also relates to the sculpture Bois de Gósol Picasso created from a gnarled piece of boxwood he found (Musée Picasso, Paris).