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拍品专文
Executed in bold, expressive strokes of gouache and ink, Nu assis illustrates the passionate vitality and distinct sense of spontaneity that marked Pablo Picasso’s work during the last decade of his life. The pyramidal form of a nude woman fills the sheet, the slender lines of her upper body giving way to heavy voluptuous curves as she sits cross-legged before us. Elegantly poised, she appears relaxed and at ease, one hand resting lightly on her voluminous thigh, while the other hovers between her legs, drawing the viewer’s eye to her sex. This direct, unabashed eroticism was typical of Picasso’s compositions from this period – ‘It’s all there,’ the artist declared to André Malraux. ‘I try to do a nude as it is. If I do a nude, people ought to think – it’s a nude’ (quoted in M.-L. Bernadac, Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate, London, 1988, p. 80).
Key to this bold, visceral approach to picture making was an abbreviated language Picasso described as écriture-peinture, a form of personal shorthand in which the human body is expressed through a handful of highly simplified, but recognisable, schematic signs. In this way, Picasso offers a visual summary of the body, allowing just a few elements to create an impression of the whole. In Nu assis, certain features are enlarged and given particular prominence, such as the woman’s feet, her soft rounded stomach punctuated by a belly-button, and the lines of her entwined, overlapping limbs, which tangle together in a dynamic array of curvaceous planes. In contrast, the woman’s face is only loosely described atop her long, slender neck, her features denoted through a series of quick brushstrokes that threaten to merge together at points. To the right, a long sweeping line of darker paint frames the woman’s figure, its shape suggesting a diaphanous veil or mantilla perhaps, the subtle gradations of pigment within it revealing the full volume of her form.
Executed in shades of delicately modulated greys and blacks, which shift in texture and translucency from one section to the next, the work is a powerful study in monochrome, recalling the grisaille techniques of the Old Masters. At the same time, the pose of the woman, seated cross-legged against a wall, her nude form revealed fully to the viewer, appears to invoke Picasso’s prolonged study of Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Musée du Louvre, 1834), which had culminated in a grand suite of compositions in 1954-1955 dedicated to the theme. Across these fifteen paintings and the numerous associated studies, Picasso reimagined and reinterpreted Delacroix’s classic, orientalist vision of women in a seraglio through his own dynamic visual language. Nu assis appears to echo the frontal, seated odalisque from the far left of Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger compositions, whom he singled out for study in works such as Les femmes d’Alger (d’après Delacroix) (Toile L) (1955, Zervos, vol. 16, no. 352; Private collection).
Throughout this period of his career, the artist’s imagination was continuously inspired by the presence of his wife Jacqueline, her petite, yet voluptuous form entrancing him. Though she never modelled for him in the traditional sense, Jacqueline’s likeness permeated every aspect of Picasso’s work – he merely required the stimulation of her proximity for her features to find their way into his paintings, and he repeatedly subjected her form to the lively play of his imagination. As the artist’s friend Hélène Parmelin noted in 1966, Jacqueline offered him ‘a hundred thousand possibilities. She unfolds to infinity… She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases…’ (Picasso Says…, London, 1966, p. 68). In particular, Picasso delighted in her resemblance to the right-hand figure of Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, seen kneeling and in profile in Delacroix’s painting. With her classic Mediterranean features and sensuous figure, Jacqueline became the embodiment of the modern-day odalisque in Picasso’s mind, and the inspiration for his many depictions of the female nude through this stage of his life.
During these final years of his career, Picasso was looking at, and responding to, his own work – his own artistic legacy – as well as those of his heroes and predecessors. At the same time, he was all too aware of recent developments in contemporary art. As early as 1950, the New York dealer Sam Kootz had shown a work by Picasso alongside those of artists such as Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning in the exhibition ‘Black or White: Paintings by European and American Artists.’ Looking at Nu assis, Picasso’s awareness of the vigour of the Abstract Expressionists is evident in the rapid, energetic facture of the present sheet, the fluid washes of ink and gouache overlapping and running into one another, his brush traversing the surface in quick, graphic strokes. At the same time, his vision remains firmly tethered to the figurative, the woman’s nude form dominating the composition with her sensuous presence.
Key to this bold, visceral approach to picture making was an abbreviated language Picasso described as écriture-peinture, a form of personal shorthand in which the human body is expressed through a handful of highly simplified, but recognisable, schematic signs. In this way, Picasso offers a visual summary of the body, allowing just a few elements to create an impression of the whole. In Nu assis, certain features are enlarged and given particular prominence, such as the woman’s feet, her soft rounded stomach punctuated by a belly-button, and the lines of her entwined, overlapping limbs, which tangle together in a dynamic array of curvaceous planes. In contrast, the woman’s face is only loosely described atop her long, slender neck, her features denoted through a series of quick brushstrokes that threaten to merge together at points. To the right, a long sweeping line of darker paint frames the woman’s figure, its shape suggesting a diaphanous veil or mantilla perhaps, the subtle gradations of pigment within it revealing the full volume of her form.
Executed in shades of delicately modulated greys and blacks, which shift in texture and translucency from one section to the next, the work is a powerful study in monochrome, recalling the grisaille techniques of the Old Masters. At the same time, the pose of the woman, seated cross-legged against a wall, her nude form revealed fully to the viewer, appears to invoke Picasso’s prolonged study of Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Musée du Louvre, 1834), which had culminated in a grand suite of compositions in 1954-1955 dedicated to the theme. Across these fifteen paintings and the numerous associated studies, Picasso reimagined and reinterpreted Delacroix’s classic, orientalist vision of women in a seraglio through his own dynamic visual language. Nu assis appears to echo the frontal, seated odalisque from the far left of Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger compositions, whom he singled out for study in works such as Les femmes d’Alger (d’après Delacroix) (Toile L) (1955, Zervos, vol. 16, no. 352; Private collection).
Throughout this period of his career, the artist’s imagination was continuously inspired by the presence of his wife Jacqueline, her petite, yet voluptuous form entrancing him. Though she never modelled for him in the traditional sense, Jacqueline’s likeness permeated every aspect of Picasso’s work – he merely required the stimulation of her proximity for her features to find their way into his paintings, and he repeatedly subjected her form to the lively play of his imagination. As the artist’s friend Hélène Parmelin noted in 1966, Jacqueline offered him ‘a hundred thousand possibilities. She unfolds to infinity… She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases…’ (Picasso Says…, London, 1966, p. 68). In particular, Picasso delighted in her resemblance to the right-hand figure of Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, seen kneeling and in profile in Delacroix’s painting. With her classic Mediterranean features and sensuous figure, Jacqueline became the embodiment of the modern-day odalisque in Picasso’s mind, and the inspiration for his many depictions of the female nude through this stage of his life.
During these final years of his career, Picasso was looking at, and responding to, his own work – his own artistic legacy – as well as those of his heroes and predecessors. At the same time, he was all too aware of recent developments in contemporary art. As early as 1950, the New York dealer Sam Kootz had shown a work by Picasso alongside those of artists such as Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning in the exhibition ‘Black or White: Paintings by European and American Artists.’ Looking at Nu assis, Picasso’s awareness of the vigour of the Abstract Expressionists is evident in the rapid, energetic facture of the present sheet, the fluid washes of ink and gouache overlapping and running into one another, his brush traversing the surface in quick, graphic strokes. At the same time, his vision remains firmly tethered to the figurative, the woman’s nude form dominating the composition with her sensuous presence.