Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Private Collection, Italy

Galerie de Bellecour, Lyon

Lillian Heidenberg Fine Art, New York

Private Collection (sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 12, 1999, lot 445 )

Private Collection (acquired at the above sale and sold: Christie's, New York, November 7, 2001, lot 285)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1964, vol. 24, Paris, 1971,  no. 354, illustrated pl. 139

The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties II, San Francisco, 2002, no. 64-353, illustrated p. 125

Excellent condition. Original canvas. The canvas is well-stretched and only very slightly relaxed in the lower right corner. The paint layer is fresh and well-preserved. Under UV, there is no evidence of retouching.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The raven-haired Jacqueline was the muse of Picasso's painting during the last twenty years of his life.  The couple met in 1952 and married in 1961, living together for over 20 years despite their forty-five year age difference.   But more than any other woman in his life, Jacqueline worshipped the aging artist, remaining with him until his death in 1973.  By all accounts, Picasso was the center of Jacqueline's universe, but it was she who inspired the salacious, wildly abstracted nudes that dominate the maestro's late career. 

As was the case for all of the women who inspired him, Jacqueline never formally posed for the artist, but her features are recognizable in most of these pictures.  Picasso's approach to rendering her image in the nude, however, was often modeled after historical precedents.  The Spanish painter Francisco de Goya was the artist of whom Picasso spoke the most, and his admiration for the master of the early 18th century is clear in his depictions of the reclining Jacqueline.  As Alejandro Vergara observes about the reclining nudes from this period, "The clearest manifestation of Picasso's interest in the art of Goya in the last phase of his life is to be found in a series of female nudes executed from the 1950s onwards.  Here Picasso combined various influences that included the great masters of the European tradition of nude painting, from Titian's mythological compositions and the works of Lucas Cranach and Rubens to the odalisques of Delacroix and Ingres.  In some cases Picasso was inspired by this tradition in a general way, which in other he looked to a particular artist or painting.  This is the case with Reclining Nude, a work that immediately brings to mind Goya's Naked Maja" (A. Vergara in Picasso, Tradition and Avant-Garde (exhibition catalogue), Museo Nacional del Prado & Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2006, p. 333) .    

Marie-Laure Bernadac writes that in 1964, "after isolating the painter in a series of portraits, it was logical that Picasso should now paint the model alone: that is to say a nude woman lying on a divan, offered up to the painter's eyes and to the man's desire. 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 woman as model. This 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" (Marie-Laure Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972, Painting as Model," Late Picasso, Exhibition Catalogue, Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1988, p. 78).

Speaking of his paintings of nudes and the liberties that he took with abstracting the body, Picasso provided the following explanation of his intentions: "I want to say nude.  I don't want to do a nude as a nude.  I want only to say breast, say foot, say hand or belly.  To find the way to say it -- that's enough. I don't want to paint the nude from head to foot, but to succeed in saying...For you, one look and the nude tells you what she is without verbage" (quoted in H. Parmelin, Picasso dit, Paris, 1966, p. 151).