Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (no. 015640, photo no. 64303)
Marlborough Gallery, New York

C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Œuvres de 1971 à 1972, vol. XXXIII, Paris, 1958, p. 165, no. 483 (illustrated)

New York, Marlborough Gallery, On Paper: Selected Drawings of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, New York, 2000, p. 28, no. 104 (illustrated)
London, Sotheby’s S|2, The Nude in the XX & XXI Century, 2015-16, no. 38

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity by Claude Ruiz Picasso.

A tremendous surge of creative energy and urgency compelled Picasso to produce a rich and vast body of work in the last years of his life. When paired with his feverish, prolific output, this bears testament to the artist’s constant search for innovation as he abandoned himself into a final stage of pure, almost childlike, experimentation.

During this late Indian summer in Picasso's career, the artist remained preoccupied with his favourite subject of eroticism, now brought into the realm of unearthing fantasy. In the present work, the artist fuses several of his recurring motifs: the voluptuous, sculptural nudes are the object of several voyeurs’ affections – including a hedonistic mousquetaire, perhaps a stand-in for the artist himself. In Deux nus et têtes d’hommes, Picasso is not mourning the loss of his former energy so much as reviving it, if only in pictorial form. When he visualizes these erotic scenes later in life, these representations become his way of vicariously participating. This sense of invocation is as apparent in the subject matter as it is in the vivid and vivacious style with which Deux nus et têtes d’hommes has been drawn. There is an almost violent sense of activity apparent in his frenzied use of shading and line. Here, the artist’s use of shading is strategic: it is concentrated almost solely on the woman’s body to the right of the composition, as her voyeurs remain in the periphery. The effect is to create a pulsating energy that guides the viewer’s eye around the scene, from women to voyeurs, and back again. Here, in his late age, Picasso himself has become a voyeur, and in his technical manipulations of the composition, he has cleverly relegated us, as viewers, into complicit voyeurs as well.