Pablo Picasso

During the summer months of 1970, Picasso created a substantial number of drawings, executed in pencil, chalk, ink, gouache or coloured crayons. The following year, nearly two hundred drawings – representing almost all of the drawings produced by artist over a period of thirteen months between December 1969 and January 1971, and including the present sheet – were exhibited at the Galerie Louis Leiris in Paris. Drawn on Sunday, the 31st of May 1970, this large sheet was the third of seven drawings of female nudes produced in one sketchbook on that day. Five of the drawings depicted single seated or reclining nudes, while one added a second female nude and the other included a seated male figure.

As one scholar has written, ‘Picasso is boldly devotional and adoring of women in the drawings of his last years…Part sad remembrance of things past, part idolatrous preoccupation with the body of his young wife, many of the drawings have the character of devotional images…The drawings restore a sense of well-being and vigor with the promise of an Arcadian restoration of youthfulness and vitality.’

It has further been noted of Picasso that his late drawings ‘offer a richness of ideas and iconography for which no complete lexicon is likely to exist…The unabashedly first-person, diarylike entries, compulsively dated and frequently serialized, probably once held together more tightly, like a vast confessional epic novel. We are at a disadvantage, left to consider them now as individual sheets without the benefit of viewing the drawings in their original sequences as an organic whole.’