Femme et jeune garçon nus

Pablo Picasso’s Femme et jeune garçon nus is a vibrant and complex work on paper, executed over the course of five days in June 1969 at the artist’s villa in Mougins. Using a masterful network of rhythmic lines in pen, along with rich brushstrokes of India ink and colored crayons, the present work offers a vision of a bucolic idyll in which two nude figures recline amid the landscape. To the left, a young boy lies on his front, playfully kicking his feet up behind him. His gaze shies away from the viewer, but a slight smile lingers. He is perhaps a congenial cupid, a character also found in a number of Picasso’s Mousquetaires from this same year (Zervos, vol. 31, nos. 66, 67, 71, 73 and 78). Alongside this pre-adolescent youth, a woman dozes serenely, her head lolling into her cupped palm, her body described in bold, swirling contour lines that emphasize the swell of her breasts, ankles, calves and biceps. She is perhaps a manifestation of Jacqueline Roque, whom Picasso married in 1961, and whose presence permeated the artist’s work from the mid-1950s until his death. Although Roque does not appear to have formally posed as a model for Picasso, she captivated his imagination, and her essence is inexorably woven through his art of this period.
1969—the year in which Femme et jeune garçon nus was executed—was one of the most prolific of Picasso’s entire career. To celebrate this creative abundance, Christian and Yvonne Zervos organized the landmark exhibition, Pablo Picasso, 1969-1970, at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, France. The exhibition, which featured the present work, marked a public unveiling of Picasso’s “Great Late Phase,” and reaffirmed his place as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. The quantity of works executed over the course of 1969 reveal not only Picasso’s continued creativity in his eighty-eighth year, but also a conscious acknowledgement and assessment of his own past, as he reflected on the multitude of different styles, techniques and motifs that had marked his long career. In Femme et jeune garçon nus for example, the female protagonist’s angular and contorting limbs recall the twisting figures who appeared in Picasso’s proto-Cubist paintings from the early years of the century, such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), while the poses of both the woman and the young boy in the present work find parallels in the baigneuses from his Neo-Classical period from the 1920s. The reclining female figure’s posture, meanwhile, is also reminiscent of the Sleeping Ariadne sculptural type, a motif from antiquity that symbolizes love and its triumph over death, which Picasso had also explored at several points in his career.
With its verdant pastoral backdrop and the relaxed positions of its figures, however, the present work is perhaps most closely aligned to Picasso’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe series, which paid homage to Edouard Manet’s painting of the same title. Through the mid-1950s and early 1960s Picasso frequently alluded to his artistic predecessors in his work, measuring himself against their example—his Les femmes d’Alger suite, for example, looked back to Eugène Delacroix’s renowned 1834 painting, and in 1957 Picasso created a series of works inspired by Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas. By interacting with both the paintings of the renowned artists who had come before him, as well as the motifs and styles that he had employed at various points over his own career, Picasso was consciously reviewing his own place within the Western art historical canon. Works such as Femme et jeune garçon nus, therefore, offer a reflection on both Picasso’s perception of the art he admired, as well as a personal meditation on his own artistic legacy.