PABLO PICASSO

(1881-1973)

Homme et femme

Footnotes

Provenance
Galerie Louis Leiris, Paris.
Anon. sale, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, 16 January 2000, lot 50.
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 8 February 2001, lot 485.
Private collection, UK; their sale, Christie's, Paris, 2 December 2008, lot 49.
Private collection, France.
Anon. sale, Farsettiarte, Milan, 9 June 2018, lot 514.
Private collection, Italy (acquired at the above sale).

Literature
C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol 25, Oeuvres de 1965 à 1967, Paris, no. 227 (illustrated pl. 112).
C. Feld & R. Char, Picasso, dessins 27.3.66-15.3.68, Paris, 1969, no. 23 (illustrated).
The Picasso Project (eds.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue, 1885-1973, The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 66-096 (illustrated p. 257).

In the last decade of Picasso's life, the artist was largely preoccupied by the erotic tension between the male and the female figure. Throughout the 1960s the female nude is often juxtaposed with the embodiment of the artist himself, whether in the guise of a musketeer, painter or a shepherd as in the present composition. These nude female bodies are variously observed, worshiped, caressed or violated by the male figures they share the page or canvas with.

In Homme et femme Picasso's obsessive treatment of this subject can be seen in the erotic play between the shocked female figure who hides her face with expressively wrought hands, and the diminutive male figure, exposing himself to her either knowingly or unknowingly. Picasso worked at a prodigious rate in these most productive of years, and the imprint of another work (C. Zervos, Vol 25, no. 226) can be seen on the surface of Homme et femme, the mark of the Spanish master's hand evident when looking at the sheet in raking light.