Nu assis

Elegantly proportioned and vividly colored, Picasso’s Nu assis evokes a beautiful young woman in an intimate moment of contemplation. Brought to life in curvaceous, confident line, the artist’s model sits with a sheet of paper in one hand, the other resting gently upon her seat, her eyes cast down as she reads the text in front of her, her tousled hair arranged in a playful bow. At once modern in appearance, the present work conjures the ancient narrative of Bathsheba as seen by King David from the Old Testament; Picasso taking his cue from the great old master painter Rembrandt van Rijn who depicted Bathsheba at her Bath (1654; Louvre, Paris) following on from his lithographic explorations of 1947, inspired by Lucas Cranach’s David and Bathsheba (1526; Staatliche Museen, Berlin). Modernizing this age old subject, Picasso reimagines a historic moment of eroticism and desire with reverence, curiosity and familiarity.
Picasso had begun the year of 1963 absorbed within the motif of the painter and model, a subject he would work on intensively through a proliferation of works on paper and canvases, exploring the dynamic between model and artist. Often occupying either side of a horizontal format, the painter and his muse were often engaged in a tension borne of desire; the easel or canvas acting as a dividing line between them. This dynamic compositional structure would therefore prove to represent the very concept of desire as leading to the creative act, witnessed by both the passionate lover and the painter, where he too explored the paradox of yearning to possess whilst acknowledging the insatiability of his innate drives which could only be overcome by one of two physical acts. "The more Picasso painted this theme, the more he pushed the artist-model relationship towards its ultimate conclusion: the artist embraces his model, cancelling out the barrier of the canvas and transforming the artist-model relationship into a man-woman relationship. Painting is an act of love, according to Gert Schiff, and John Richardson speaks of 'sex as metaphor for art, and art as a metaphor for sex' " (M.-L. Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model," Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 77).
Belonging to a series of ten works on paper begun with Nu assis on 2 May 1963, Picasso employs Rembrandt’s motif in a similar vein, as an expression of masculine desire. The biblical narrative begins with the moment that King David sees the beautiful young Bathsheba bathing, whereupon he desires to possess her. The voyeuristic element of this potent moment resonates with Picasso as an artist as much as it reflects his rapacious male gaze, correlating with his experience as painter upon finding new inspiration. The absorbing preoccupation of reading evokes a romantic notion of fantasy, enhancing the sense possession over a private moment that is not the voyeur’s own and his desire to capture it. In embodying the viewpoint of King David, Picasso brings to life anew this epiphanic instant which would come bear significant consequences, likening it to his own experiences in the discovery of a new muse from which his creative process would famously spring to life. "No painter has ever gone so far in unveiling the feminine universe in all the complexity of its real and fantasy life. This intimate, passionate awareness is a constant source of renewal for his painting, which revels in the variety of the repertoire of forms that it affords, mineral and carnal by turns" (ibid., p. 80).
Picasso’s Nu assis further merges the image of Bathsheba with that of his own significant muse, Jacqueline Roque. The distinctive characteristics of her dark hair and strong profile are enhanced by the sideways pose, her headscarf tied in a bow replacing Bathsheba’s headdress in pearls of red from Rembrandt’s original. Picasso would paint Jacqueline more times than any other model, often supplanting her into masterworks from the trove of his greatest sources of inspiration, his desire for her sustaining him until the end of his life. "It is her image that permeates Picasso's work from 1954 to his death, twice as long as any of her predecessors. It is her body that we are able to explore exhaustively and more intimately than any other body in the history of art. It is her solicitude and patience that sustained the artist in the face of declining health and death and enabled him to go on working in his ninety-second year. And lastly it her vulnerability that gives a new intensity to the combination of cruelty and tenderness that endows Picasso's paintings of women with their pathos and their strength" (ibid., p. 47).