Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above on December 31, 1960)
Thence by descent

Wilhelm Boeck & Jaime Sabartés, Picasso, London, 1962, no. 96
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1959 à 1961, vol. XIX, Paris, 1973, no. 350, illustrated pl. 106
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties I, 1960-63, San Francisco, 2004, no. 60-264, illustrated p. 88

Executed on cream colored laid paper which is affixed to a frame by hinges at several places around the perimeter on verso. Both sides of the sheet are visible in the frame. Top, right and bottom edges are deckled. Left edge is cut. The letter R is written in another hand at lower right corner of verso. Sheet is slightly dirty, otherwise find. This work is in very good condition.
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"Drawing, to Picasso, means living, with a special kind of life that is often self-sufficient... When he draws, Picasso is surrounded by a multitude of figures that have been his familiars for years. They present themselves, demand his attention and then play a charade for his amusement, and incidentally our own" (Roland Penrose, "Some Recent Drawings by Picasso," 1968, translated in P.S. Falla, ed., A Picasso Anthology, London, 1981, p. 268).

In the autumn of 1960, the year in which the present work was executed, Picasso exhibited a series of drawings at the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris. As Roland Penrose writes, the works focused on a small repertoire of iconic Spanish images, of "Slender ladies with towering mantillas, witchlike peasant women and flamenco dancers surround[ing] the impassive picador, centre of all admiration, in an aura of flying skirts and provocative gestures." As Penrose argues, "The drawings, masterly in their creation of movement and suspense, were once a brilliant proof of Picasso's nostalgia for Spain and the ease with which he could communicate his passion to us. Never had the skill of his hand as a draftsman and the invention of his wit been used with more cunning and with more success" (Roland Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, London, 1971, p. 443).

Focusing on the female subject in the present work, Picasso combines the figure of the nude girl, recalling the erotically charged figure of the flamenco dancer, with the figure of the Celestina, or hooded old woman, a recurrent image throughout Picasso’s oeuvre that first appeared in 1903-04. Depicted face-to-face in profile, the figures convey a powerful dynamic against a black and white background that starkly highlights the body of the nude girl and the dark cloak of the old woman. Indeed the work is double-sided: the verso displays Picasso’s tireless experimentation with the Cubist pictorial mode in depicting the human form, and provides a revealing accompaniment to the iconic Spanish imagery of the recto.