Pablo Picasso

Carl Nesjar (a gift from the artist)

Executed on white wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount at the top two corners. The top edge is perforated. Apart from some very light handling dirt to the edges, this work is in very good condition.
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This work presents the eventual terminus of Picasso's monumental campaign with Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), the spectre of which had haunted the Spaniard's entire adult career. Two bearded men, one sporting a cap with trailing hat bands, immediately recognizable from Manet's work, bear down on two female victims. Transforming a rural bohemian picnic into a savage and carnal rape scene, this picture stands as Picasso's attempt finally to exorcize the ghost of Manet from his oeuvre.

Picasso's confrontation with Manet's canonical painting, to which the present work is critical, was not merely a continuation of a thematic tradition, but has its roots in something more instinctual, deftly summarised by John Richardson:
'Why did Picasso lock horns with one great painter after another? Was it a trial of strength like arm wrestling? Was it out of admiration or mockery, irony or homage, Oedipal rivalry or Spanish chauvinism? Each case was different, but there is always an element of identification, an element of cannibalism involved - two elements that, as Freud pointed out, are part of the same process. Indeed Freud described the process of identification as 'psychic cannibalism': you identified with someone; you cannibalized them; you assumed their powers. How accurately this describes what the predatory old genius was up to in his last years.' (J. Richardson, 'L'Epoque Jacqueline', Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, London, 1988, p. 31)

The present work is dedicated to Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar, who met Picasso in 1957 and introduced him to the technique of casting sculpture in concrete. In 1962, the year the present work was executed, they collaborated on Picasso's first monumental public sculpture in America, Tête, in Chicago's Civic Center.