

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, INDIANA
This intriguing statement reveals the fascination that Manet’s celebrated painting held for Pablo Picasso. Picasso was to revisit the work of many great masters for his “variations,” such as Cranach, Velásquez, Rembrandt and Delacroix, but his experiments with the composition of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe were to be the most profound and complex of them all. Drawn to this particular composition’s almost mythical status as a painting of upmost modernity and bourgeois subversion, where oddly paired nude and clothed figures inhabit a strange theatrical scene, Picasso began to work on a series of his own versions beginning in 1954 with highly developed drawings such as the present work and soon progressing to a series of paintings, of which he executed twenty-seven between the years of 1959 and 1961.