“To the last, [Picasso] poured all his impassioned humanity into his art. Thus, his last works teach us something that cannot be deduced from the more detached works of other giants in their old age. By pushing the limits of our self-awareness a little further, Picasso undermines our moral complacency in the name of his own honest and fearless humanism. Quite often, he does so with disarming naïveté and exquisite humour. For all of these reasons, his last period has a special place within his development.  It is not a 'swan song' but the apotheosis of his career.”
—Gert Schiff

Executed on 2 June 1970, Pablo Picasso’s Nu debout et nu assis encapsulates the profound introspection and artistic innovation characteristic of the artist’s late career. This significant work on paper was showcased in the 1999 exhibition Figurative Art from the 20th Century at C & M Arts in New York—subsequently renamed Mnuchin Gallery. Positioned among modern masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, and Willem de Kooning, the exhibition was noted by Ken Johnson in The New York Times for its thematic focus on female representations, suggesting an almost mystical reverence for femininity among the featured artists, and described as being ‘a sly, nonchronological installation that sets up surprising conversations between works not ordinarily associated […] an entertaining and provocative show.’ⁱ

Looking at Late Picasso

 

Picasso actively utilised his sketchbooks in his final years, dating and numbering nearly all the drawings he entered into them. As he explained, ‘I search incessantly, and there is a logical sequence in all this research. That’s why I number them. It’s an experiment in time.’ⁱⁱ Immediately preceded by a series of four drawings, each depicting similar interactions between two figures imagined in a range of different roles from musicians to mousquetaires, In Nu debout et nu assis, Picasso juxtaposes a robust, seated nude rendered in vibrant, saturated tones, and a statuesque standing figure composed of delicately sketched lines. The contrast between the women explores dualities of visibility and introspection, a recurring theme in Picasso’s work from this period especially evident in his investigation into the relational dynamics between artist and model. In Nu debout et nu assis, Picasso returns to a variation of this artist and model motif, a subject he began exploring in depth in the early 1960s, engaging with the art historical legacy of Old Masters such as Rembrandt, El Greco, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Édouard Manet.

 

The interaction between the two nudes in Nu debout et nu assis—with the standing figure touching her own representation—reinterprets the classical artist-model dynamic. Picasso's composition evokes Diego Velázquez’s Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), a painting itself following in the tradition of Titian and Peter Paul Rubens. By transforming the mirror in The Rokeby Venus into a distorted reflection—or a drawing within a drawing—of the model, Picasso not only aligns himself with this artistic lineage but positions his work as its culmination. The rich dialogue between artist and model that runs through European art history is reimagined here as a self-reflective inquiry into the nature of creation and representation itself, one that recalls the complex visual dynamics of an earlier work, the bright and boldly patterned Jeune fille devant un miroir (Marie-Thérèse) now held in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The tactile quality of Nu debout et nu assis, enhanced by its intimate, handheld scale, invites the viewer to experience Picasso’s engagement with his medium as something direct and personal, imbuing it with a unique immediacy.

 

Moreover, the image of a woman contemplating her own reflection connects to the centuries-old tradition of vanitas paintings—meditations on the transience of beauty and life—reimagined here by Picasso. On the left side of Nu debout et nu assis, a seated nude confronts the viewer. Her head is disproportionately small in comparison to the exaggerated form of her body, with crisscrossing streaks of colour lining her limbs like armour, converging on her pronounced disk-shaped breasts like decorative armour. She wears green high heels, given exaggerated prominence in the foreground, her pose open and revealing. This figure is a colossal creature, part mythic mother, part embodiment of the monstrous feminine. Her left arm spans nearly the entire vertical length of the page, visually bisecting the composition.

“When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes...”
—Pablo Picasso

On the right, a woman in profile gazes at and reaches toward the more grotesque figure to the left. Sparsely drawn, she remains defined by the raw paper's colour and texture, save for a distinctive headband that clearly identifies the subject as Picasso’s second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Her distinctive large eyes, dark brows, and straight nose dominated Picasso’s works during this period. In 1962, he created a multi-medium series of paintings, works on paper, metal sculptures, and cut paper constructions in which Jacqueline mostly appears in profile, often wearing either a headband or a ruban vert—a ‘green ribbon.’ The saturation of colour and pattern, coupled with the complexity of the composition, generates an atmosphere of claustrophobic eroticism, where contrasting forces collide - youth and age, innocence and experience, calm and menace, the inner self and outward appearance. These contrasts, fused into a single, multifaceted image in Nu debout et nu assis, demonstrate Picasso’s mastery of embodying tension and complexity.

 

Created during a prolific period shortly before Picasso’s 89th birthday, Nu debout et nu assis reflects the urgency and depth that defined his late career. His productivity during this phase was driven by an acute awareness of time’s passage. Even as he approached his 90th birthday, Picasso’s drive remained undiminished, as he famously remarked, ‘I have less and less time and I have more and more to say.’ⁱⁱⁱ In November 1971, Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who had first met Picasso in 1932 and had documented much of his sculpture, visited him at his home in Mougins to celebrate this milestone. Reflecting on the encounter, Brassaï observed, ‘Such a flowering of creative energy would be astonishing enough in a man who has already lived longer than many of the great artists of history, but in Picasso’s case there is an even more astonishing factor: Instead of bringing with it a slackening of his physical ardour, his great age seems only to stir up the demons within and heighten the intensity of his erotic imaginings.’^iv This vitality, so vividly described by Brassaï, is palpable in Nu debout et nu assis. The work’s intimate scale enhances the immediacy of Picasso’s hand, with each mark infused with the energy and sensuality that defined his final years.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Created in 1970, the present work is a vibrant and energetic example of Picasso’s late work, evidencing the consistent emphasis that the artist placed on drawing throughout his practice. The work is highly characteristic of Picasso's work from this triumphant late period in both stylistic and thematic terms, taking on the long subject of the female nude and her relationship to questions of artistic creation and representation.
   

• Picasso's work is currently the focus of a major exhibtion, Picasso for Asia: A Conversation, hosted by M+ in Hong Kong. the show marks the first time that a museum collection from Asia is in dialogue with masterpieces from the Musée nationale Picasso-Paris.  
   

• Nu debout et nu assis is coming to auction from the esteemed collection of Marcel Brient.  

 

 

ⁱ Ken Johnson, "In a Man's World Is a Subterranean Feminine Soul: The Indomitable Muse," The New York Times, October 22, 1999.

ⁱⁱ Pablo Picasso, quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, New York, 1972, p. ⁱⁱⁱ Pablo Picasso, quoted in David Sylvester, Late Picasso, exh. cat, Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 85.

^iv Brassaï, quoted in John Richardson and Marilyn McCully, Pablo Picasso: 26 Drawings from the Berggruen Sketchbook, London, 2005, p. 7.