Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme nue, 1906. Estimate $700,000–1,000,000.
Buste de femme nue is one of a series of drawings, many now in museum collections, which inform a large-scale oil he was to complete in Paris in the fall of 1906. Of this painting, Margaret Werth writes “While Two Nudes constitutes a high point in Picasso’s strictly pictorial investigation of the possibilities and limits of figuration in 1906, it is certainly more than a formal exercise… The painting is also liminal in that it situates itself between formal investigation and allegorical or narrative subject; between the classical and the archaic or primitive; between materialization and dematerialization of the body; between figuration and disfiguration; and between masculine and feminine” (Picasso, The Early Years 1892-1906 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1997-98, p. 277).
