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Descriptif du lot
The female nude became an almost omnipresent subject in Pablo Picasso’s art in the final decade of his life. Amid the cavalcade of musketeers that populated his work, scenes of nude female figures – occasionally accompanied by male characters, or as in the present work, languidly reclining upon a bed – flowed from the artist’s hand in passionate, expressive and often highly erotic works. Executed on 10 August 1969, Nu couché is an elegant drawing from this period of immense productivity, the sensuous contours of the woman’s body rendered in confident, flowing lines that emphasise the sumptuous sensuality of her figure. Pictured full-length, with one arm raised above her head and her legs overlapping one another, the woman reclines against a scallop-edged pillow, her eyes closed, as if lost in a dream.
Nu couché is one of a series of drawings, all executed within a few days of each other during the late summer of 1969, in which Picasso explores different variations of this alluring pose. On Sunday 10 August, the artist completed eight works, including the present composition, in which the woman’s voluptuous, undulating body is contorted in slightly different configurations, as if tracking her movements as her body shifts in sleep. While her positioning remains largely consistent across the different sheets, the artist draws attention to small, instinctual adjustments she makes, such as the placement of a hand or foot, the tilt of her chin, or the parting of her legs, revealing her sex to the viewer. These were followed by a further seven pencil drawings the following day that continued this prolonged study of the woman’s body, and two pen and ink compositions on 12 August, in which the artist adopted a more pronounced side view. One of the most intriguing features across the series of drawings is the way in which Picasso uses different types of lines to create visual connections across the scene – in the present work, the flowing locks of the woman’s hair are echoed in both the line of the bed, and the frill of the pillow.
At the time that Picasso executed Nu couché, he was immersed in an intense dialogue with the great masters of the past. In the late 1960s he had entered into battle with a number of renowned masterpieces – Eugène Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Alger, Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, as well as works by Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, responding to and interpreting their famed works in his own, distinctive style. For the rest of his career Picasso remained keenly aware of the art of the past, seeking to assess and affirm his own place within this venerated artistic lineage. Hélène Parmelin, a friend of the artist recalled, ‘Picasso is often heard to say that when he paints, all the painters are with him in the studio. Or rather behind him. Watching him. Those of yesterday, and those of today… A painter in solitude is never alone’ (Picasso Says…, London, 1969, p. 40). With her arms raised above her head, the figure in Nu couché calls to mind Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (circa 1510, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) and the traditions of the reclining female nude, running from Titian to Francisco de Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Manet.
Nu couché was acquired by the renowned Swiss gallerist, collector and philanthropist Angela Rosengart in 1993, and has remained in her personal collection for the last thirty years. Rosengart started her professional journey while still a teenager, following in the footsteps of her father Siegfried, who had established Galerie Rosengart in Lucerne, specialising in Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and classic modernism. As well as fostering an important connection to the estate of Paul Klee, and making connections with Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Georges Braque, Siegfried grew close to Picasso after the Second World War and became the artist’s sole representative in Switzerland. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Angela and her father would visit the artist every year at his home in the south of France, to see his latest projects and paintings. ‘It was always something special when he was in the mood to show us what he’d done the day before,’ she recalled (quoted in W. Cook, ‘Stealing Beauty’ in The Spectator, 5 Nov 2011, vol. 317, no. 9557, pp. 51-52). It was on one such visit in 1954, when Angela was just twenty-two, that Picasso decided to capture her likeness in a portrait, the first of five he would create of her over the years across varying media. ‘To endure Picasso’s gaze was an incredible experience,’ she recalled. ‘He seemed to bore into me with his eyes, indeed to eat me up’ (‘From “living room” to museum – a unique collection’, The Rosengart Foundation, online, accessed 22 Sept 2026).
The Rosengarts’ personal collection began almost by happenstance – in 1937, Siegfried acquired a still life painting by Cezanne, and became too fond of it to part with it. This experience profoundly shaped his approach to dealing, later explaining to Angela that one had to truly like a work of art to choose it and be able to share it with a prospective client. Through the decades, their collection gradually expanded, as they discovered new works and hidden gems in tandem with their activities at the gallery. ‘It is really the heart that spoke,’ Angela explained. ‘These are pictures my father and I particularly loved, that we wanted to have on our walls, to live with. That’s how the collection was formed, with no idea of actually creating it’ (quoted in ‘Picasso and Klee see the light in Lucerne’ online, accessed 22 Sept 2026). In 1978, Siegfried and Angela presented the city of Lucerne with eight masterpieces by Picasso to mark its 800th anniversary, a generous gesture that laid the foundations for the Lucerne Picasso Museum, which they further endowed over subsequent years. In 1992 Angela set up the Rosengart Foundation, to maintain the art collection and ensure it would be accessible to the public in Lucerne on a permanent basis, formally founding the museum in 2000, which opened its doors the spring of 2002.
Nu couché is one of a series of drawings, all executed within a few days of each other during the late summer of 1969, in which Picasso explores different variations of this alluring pose. On Sunday 10 August, the artist completed eight works, including the present composition, in which the woman’s voluptuous, undulating body is contorted in slightly different configurations, as if tracking her movements as her body shifts in sleep. While her positioning remains largely consistent across the different sheets, the artist draws attention to small, instinctual adjustments she makes, such as the placement of a hand or foot, the tilt of her chin, or the parting of her legs, revealing her sex to the viewer. These were followed by a further seven pencil drawings the following day that continued this prolonged study of the woman’s body, and two pen and ink compositions on 12 August, in which the artist adopted a more pronounced side view. One of the most intriguing features across the series of drawings is the way in which Picasso uses different types of lines to create visual connections across the scene – in the present work, the flowing locks of the woman’s hair are echoed in both the line of the bed, and the frill of the pillow.
At the time that Picasso executed Nu couché, he was immersed in an intense dialogue with the great masters of the past. In the late 1960s he had entered into battle with a number of renowned masterpieces – Eugène Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Alger, Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, as well as works by Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, responding to and interpreting their famed works in his own, distinctive style. For the rest of his career Picasso remained keenly aware of the art of the past, seeking to assess and affirm his own place within this venerated artistic lineage. Hélène Parmelin, a friend of the artist recalled, ‘Picasso is often heard to say that when he paints, all the painters are with him in the studio. Or rather behind him. Watching him. Those of yesterday, and those of today… A painter in solitude is never alone’ (Picasso Says…, London, 1969, p. 40). With her arms raised above her head, the figure in Nu couché calls to mind Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (circa 1510, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) and the traditions of the reclining female nude, running from Titian to Francisco de Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Manet.
Nu couché was acquired by the renowned Swiss gallerist, collector and philanthropist Angela Rosengart in 1993, and has remained in her personal collection for the last thirty years. Rosengart started her professional journey while still a teenager, following in the footsteps of her father Siegfried, who had established Galerie Rosengart in Lucerne, specialising in Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and classic modernism. As well as fostering an important connection to the estate of Paul Klee, and making connections with Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Georges Braque, Siegfried grew close to Picasso after the Second World War and became the artist’s sole representative in Switzerland. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Angela and her father would visit the artist every year at his home in the south of France, to see his latest projects and paintings. ‘It was always something special when he was in the mood to show us what he’d done the day before,’ she recalled (quoted in W. Cook, ‘Stealing Beauty’ in The Spectator, 5 Nov 2011, vol. 317, no. 9557, pp. 51-52). It was on one such visit in 1954, when Angela was just twenty-two, that Picasso decided to capture her likeness in a portrait, the first of five he would create of her over the years across varying media. ‘To endure Picasso’s gaze was an incredible experience,’ she recalled. ‘He seemed to bore into me with his eyes, indeed to eat me up’ (‘From “living room” to museum – a unique collection’, The Rosengart Foundation, online, accessed 22 Sept 2026).
The Rosengarts’ personal collection began almost by happenstance – in 1937, Siegfried acquired a still life painting by Cezanne, and became too fond of it to part with it. This experience profoundly shaped his approach to dealing, later explaining to Angela that one had to truly like a work of art to choose it and be able to share it with a prospective client. Through the decades, their collection gradually expanded, as they discovered new works and hidden gems in tandem with their activities at the gallery. ‘It is really the heart that spoke,’ Angela explained. ‘These are pictures my father and I particularly loved, that we wanted to have on our walls, to live with. That’s how the collection was formed, with no idea of actually creating it’ (quoted in ‘Picasso and Klee see the light in Lucerne’ online, accessed 22 Sept 2026). In 1978, Siegfried and Angela presented the city of Lucerne with eight masterpieces by Picasso to mark its 800th anniversary, a generous gesture that laid the foundations for the Lucerne Picasso Museum, which they further endowed over subsequent years. In 1992 Angela set up the Rosengart Foundation, to maintain the art collection and ensure it would be accessible to the public in Lucerne on a permanent basis, formally founding the museum in 2000, which opened its doors the spring of 2002.