Acquired by the present owners by 1971

New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Picasso Drawings from the Bareiss Collection, circa 1971
Greenwich, Flinn Gallery, Molly and Walter Bareiss: Sixty Years of Collecting, 2000

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1967 et 1968, Paris, 1973, vol. XXVII, no. 315, illustrated p. 122
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture.  The Sixties III, 1968-1969, San Francisco, 2003, no. 68-155, illustrated p. 46

Executed on white wove paper, not laid down, glued to the mount at all four corners. There is a very small speck of dirt to the lower right quadrant in the chair leg. The left edge is slightly dirty and there are a few faint smudges to the sheet near the upper right corner. Overall this work is in good condition. Colours: There is less blue in the paper tone in the original.
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Like most of Picasso's late paintings and drawings, Homme et Femme Nu Dormant has its origin in the subject of a painter and his model.  In a series of drawings, and ultimately lar🐓ge canvases, Picasso developed a number of variations on this theme, always characterised by a great spontaneity in handling, and an extraordinarily creative energy.  Never tiring of exploring visual means of depicting erotic tension,  Picasso's men and women are seen in various costumes and performing various activities.

At the time he completed the present work, Picasso was in his eighties. It is believed that these pictures, featuring a virulent, playful and often flirtatious male figure, were meant to embody the artist's lost youth and vigor. This depiction, as well as the others like it that Picasso completed around this tiꦆme, were understood to be disguised portraits of the artist himself and his wife, Jacqueline. The identity of the couple here is decipherable with Jacqueline's characteristic almond eyes and pulled back black hair and Picasso's unmistakable bulbous head, strong profile and thick hand. 

Gert Schiff has written about the significance of these pictures, observing how they offer an escape from the struggles of everyday life in a manner similar to Gauguin's pictures of his Tahitian paradise: "Here the old artist revives one last time that dream which Paul Gauguin had impressed so forcibly upon his generation: the flight from civilisation.  To think there are whole peoples who lie in the sand and pipe upon bamboo canes!  To think that it should be possible to rid oneself of all norms and necessities of modern life, of the curse of individuality - to live a life without memory, hence without death; to come into being and disintegrate like a plant and to span the interim safely embedded in the mythical collective of a primitive society.  Could it be that the brain itself is the result of a faulty development?  This question seems to lurk behind those large paintings like Nude Man and Woman and The Aubade  in which Picasso transforms his bucolic figures into budding primeval giants" (Gert Schiff, Picasso, The Last Years, 1963-1973 (exhibition catalogue), The Grey Art Gallery, New York Univ♏ersity, 1983).