Guillaume Apollinaire, Paris
Berggruen & Cie., Paris
Eugene Istomin, New York

Paris, Galerie Knoedler, Picasso, 1971
Paris, Berggruen et Cie., Œuvres Cubistes: Braque, Gris, Léger, Picasso, 1973, no. 3

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, supplément aux années 1907-1909, Paris, 1973, vol. XXVI, no. 327, illustrated pl. 108
Pierre Daix & Joan Rosselet, Picasso, The Cubist Years 1907-1916: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works, London, 1979, no. 117, illustrated p. 212 (titled Study for Three Women)

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, T-hinged to the mount at two points along the top edge. There is a 2cm. sq. paper loss to the centre of the bottom edge. There is a small tear to the bottom edge and a 1.5cm. tear to the right of the bottom edge (not visible when framed). There is a light horizontal flattened crease across the centre of the work, and a smaller vertical flattened crease running from the centre of the top edge to the centre of the figure. Apart from some minimal paper losses to the bottom edge (not visible when framed), some surface dirt mainly to the extreme edges, and some light time staining to the sheet, this work is in good condition.
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Nu agenouillé belongs to a series of Picasso's studies in pencil, gouache and oil, that culminated in the monumental Trois femmes, completed in the autumn of 1908.  These sketches not only demonstrate various stages, processes and changes in the artist's mind that led to the final work, but also constitute a vital body of experimental work that resulted in the invention of Analytic Cubism. Situated between two cornerstones of early Cubism - Demoiselles d'Avignon and Trois femmes, all of these studies deal with the subject of the female nude, some concentrating on single figures, others on a group. Never tiring of his subject matter, Picasso used this theme in a stream of experimentations and innovations that eventually led to one of the most revolutionary changes in the course of Twentieth Century art.

In the sketches of late 1907 and early 1908 executed shortly after Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso further developed or reworked some of the crucial ideas first explored in that painting and its related studies. While the composition of the Demoiselles is built up of flat forms, in the subsequent studies the artist tried to give his figures a more sculptural, three-dimensional form. In Nu agenouillé, the female body is divided into the modules of the almond-shape and the triangle, a solution that is stylistically between the more curved and the hard-edged, angular variants. 'Picasso seems first to have experimented with this mixed angular and curvilinear style in late spring 1907, when he was thinking about revising the canvas of the Demoiselles to make it look more three-dimensional. He returned to it in early 1908, when he confronted the same tension between sculptural and decorative approaches in his work on the Three Women'. [...] In retrospect, the Three Women appears as a decisive turning point in the history of Cubism. It made a tremendous impression on the other members of Picasso's circle, achieving the success he had aimed for but failed to achieve with the Demoiselles d'Avignon. Specifically, what attracted the attention of Braque and other artists was the way that Picasso's combination of interlocking shapes and geometric faceting solved the problem of integrating figure and ground without sacrificing the sense of sculptural form' (Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, New Haven & London, 2003, p. 60).

COMP: 422D07009_COMP
Pablo Picasso, Trois Femmes, 1907༒-08, oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg