Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Galerie D'Eendt N.V., Amsterdam
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Œuvres de 1961 et 1962, Paris, 1968, vol. XX, no. 324, illustrated pl. 130
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 62-156, illustrated p. 257

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, T-hinged to the mount at two points to the top edge. The top edge is perforated. There is a 0.5cm. tear towards the top left corner. Apart from some slight mount staining to all four edges, this work is in very good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

COMP: 436D07009_COMP
Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

In the present work, the male figure's portrait is immediately reminiscent of a young Picasso, as described in early self-portraits such as Self-portrait with Palette (Fig. 1). It is testament to Picasso's formidable aptitude of 'picking things up, consciously or unconsciously, where he had left them long before' (D. Sylvester, 'End Game', Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, London, 1988, p. 142). As the young Picasso, this cross-legged twenty-something, replete with the carnal functionality of youth, sits as antithesis to the frail decrepitude then enshrouding the eighty year old Picasso sitting in his new home Notre-Dame-de-Vie . In this light we should consider David Sylvester's argument that 'The dignity of an old man's acceptance of approaching death is touched by absurdity in so far as he is already dead as a man' (D. Sylvester, 'End Game', Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, London, 1988, p.137). This theme was made explicit by Picasso himself in an admission to Brassai: 'whenever I see you, my first impulse is to...offer you a cigarette, even though I know that neither of us smokes any longer. Age has forced us to give it up, but the desire remains. It's the same thing with making love. We don't do it any more but the desire is still with us!' (cited in J. Richardson, 'L'Epoque Jacqueline', Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, London, 1988, p. 29).

The deep black orbs of the young man's eyes hold a mesmeric and somewhat tragic voyeuristic power; especially as they contrast so markedly with the serenity of the sleeping woman's shut eyelids and their radiating lashes. This drawing was produced during Picasso's 1959-62 prolific struggle with Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863, Musée d'Orsay), a painting whose central mission is, of course, to accost the stigma of voyeurism. Picasso had always harboured interest in the role of the voyeur, but as a dilapidated octogenarian the realisation of his rejuvenated self, empowered through the act of seeing, became acutely poignant. This drawing is the vestige of a life committed to exploring themes related to the nature of looking as chronicled by that at once paradoxically incongruous and ho༒nest relationship:  the artist and the model.