Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto
Acquired from the above in 1971

Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Picasso at Large in Toronto Collections, 1988

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1967 et 1968, vol. XXVII, Paris, 1973, no. 518, illustrated p. 188
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties II, 1965-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 67-367, illustrated p. 389

This work is in excellent original condition. Executed on cream wove paper. Sheet is affixed to a mat on the upper edge on the verso. The edges are deckled. The sheet is extremely bright and fresh and the line is strong.
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Picasso’s unyieldingly powerful line, brandished to perfection in Deux Femmes et Homme, serves as the very foundation of the artist's late work. This courageous and graphic image exemplifies the Primitivist style that figures in so many of Picasso’s most successful compositions, and the mask-like profile and crouching pose of the central figure, likely a depiction of his lover Jacqueline Roque, recalls the confrontational faces in his Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 (see fig. 1).

This lascivious male, savor⭕ing the visual delights of nude female figures, belongs to a series of works from the late 1960s that are understood to be thinly veiled references to the artist and his wife, Jacqueline. The contortions of the model, whose dark facial features indeed resemble those of Jacqueline, also call to mind some of Picasso's most sensually explicit depictions of the voluptuous Marie-Thérèse from the 1930s. In this later work, however, a male figure has entered the composition, whose physical proximity to the nude could be interpreted as the 88-year-old Picasso himself reclaiming the sexual stamina of his youth.

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 honest relationship: the artist and the model. Inherent themes of sex and passion would appear in many relatable guises throughout Picasso's final years, including not only the relationship between painter and model as depicted in the studio, but also the virile musketeers and pipe-smoking brigadiers entangled in romantic encounters with younger women in brothels. The artist's choice of an Orientalist theme can partly be attributed to his life-long admiration of the works of Ingres, whose scenes of odalisques, harems and hamams were a potent source of inspiration for Picasso's art, as were the scenes of maisons closes in the works of Degas. In the present wo🧜rk, the male figure at left appears both a reference to the aesthetiღc mastery of Ingres and a symbol of authority and strength—qualities which Picasso hoped to align with his own persona.

Fig. 1 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, oil on canvas, 1907, Museum of Moder𒊎n Art,𓃲 New York,