Junyer Vidal, Barcelona
Comtesse Claudia de Maistre, Paris
Acquired from the above in December 1961

Pierre Daix & Georges Boudaille, Picasso, The Blue and Rose Periods: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings 1900-1906, Neuchâtel, 1966, no. D.VII.2, illustrated p. 213 (titled Nu couché)
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Supplément aux années 1892-1902, vol. XXI, Paris, 1969, no. 408, illustrated pl. 155
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso, The Early Years, 1881-1907, New York, 1981, no. 762, illustrated p. 305 (titled Reclining Nude)
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Blue Period, 1902-1904, San Francisco, 2011, no. 1902-113, illustrated p. 41

Executed on a printed business card. Taped to window mat along edges on verso. Some patches of skinning and remnants of old labels on verso. Sheet is slightly time darkened overall, otherwise fine. Work is in excellent condition.
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The present drawing depicts a reclining nude woman, her head turned away from the viewer so that it can be observed in strict profile, with the sharply delineated, classicizing features of Greco-Roman statuary. She relaxes against a cushion, one arm behind her head, with her opposite knee raised and long hair flowing down her back. Her expression is neutral and poised, her gaze is distant. The drawing is taut and linear without heavy, Expressionist shading, anticipating the classicizing, Ingres-like portraits of Olga Khokhlova, among others, that Picasso would make in the years immediately following World War I. This same stylized profile appears in several other drawings that Picasso executed in 1902 and 1903, including preparatory studies for his Blue Period masterpieces Les deux soeurs and La Vie (Christian Zervos, vol. I, nos. 189 and 195).

Picasso's exploration of this rigorously idealized facial type may reflect his interest during this period in the Symbolist Puvis de Chavannes and the Neoclassical master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso was first introduced to the work of Puvis de Chavannes in the late 1890s by the Catalan painter Santiago Rusiñol, and he is known to have copied at least two scenes from the former's Panthéon frescoes in 1902. Meanwhile, although Ingres is rarely cited as an important influence on Picasso until 1905, when a retrospective of his work was mounted at the Salon d'Automne, the present image also underscores the likelihood that Picasso's interest in Ingres began earlier. In fact, a comic strip that Picasso drew to document his journey to Paris with Sebastià Junyer Vidal in April 1904 includes a sketch of the duo at Montauban, Ingres's hometown (ibid., vol. VI, no. 487; Museu Picasso, Barcelona). The most likely explanation for this stop, which would have required changing trains at Toulouse, is that they vis💟ited the Musée Ingres there.

The present work is related to a sizable group of drawings with explicit sexual themes that Picasso executed on Junyer Vidal's business cards. Pierre Daix has commented, "There are a great many drawings which breathe physical pleasure and prowess: on the business cards of his friend Junyer Vidal and on every kind of paper, in ink, colored crayon, and watercolor. They constitute a regular theater of the erotic, whose daring is breathtaking for a period still so profoundly Victorian in outlook, and were not, in fact, made public until after the cultural revolution of the 1960s. They provide us with a dimension fundamental to an understanding of the 'blue' Picasso: sex—in all its experimental variety—must be recognized, because it is an important element in life and art" (Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 33).

 

Fig. 1 The verso of the present work