Pablo Picasso's L'Étreinte

Immediate and arresting, this sensational canvas which depicts a moment of passion is an erotic masterpiece from Pablo Picasso’s final years. A couple hidden beside a tree are caught in the midst of copulation, a seemingly sudden act as denoted by the partial state of their dress—the female figure still shod and behatted, her watch still on her wrist while the male figure still wears his striped shirt. This is a brief interlude. A stolen moment. The artist and his viewer act as voyeur while the sense of urgency is further heightened by Picasso’s handling of his medium—the tree and its greenery are depicted through rushed swaths of brushwork, gobs of paint left where the brush suddenly leaves the canvas at the end of each leaf. The figures’ mouths, hands, genitals all created with smooth, fast application of pigment, while the deep blacks of the background are impenetrable to the naked eye. At the age of eighty-eight Picasso still manages to surprise and shock his viewer, the legacy of a lifet.mes .

This was not the first t.mes that Picasso had depicted sex. Going back to his earliest days as a young artist in Paris, women are depicted in various states of undress and couples are painted embracing. The Demoiselles d’Avignon, which shocked as much for its breakdown of the human form as for its subject matter of four women in a brothel, was painted by Picasso some sixty years before L'Étreinte. Since that t.mes Picasso had taken on the human form—and the human embrace—in countless guises. In 1925 a highly abstracted couple kiss in a frenetic mantle of colors, their forms so intertwined it is almost impossible to differentiate one from another (see fig. 1); in a surrealist moment the artist captured figures made of smooth, anthropomorphic pieces together on a sand dune (see fig. 2); in the Suite Vollard specific plates show a minotaur and a woman in a mythologically-laden sexual act. World War II would bring acts of sexual violence to Picasso’s drawings, surely an illusion to the disasters befalling Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s (see fig. 3).

By the 1950s Picasso had decided on a more direct engagement with the Old Masters. As the leading artist of his day he went looking for new challenges—new opponents—in the past. He took on Ingres and Velásquez, Rembrandt and Rubens, El Greco and Delacroix, Courbet and Manet. It is in these last two, perhaps, to which the present work owes the greatest debt. Manet exhibited Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in the Salon des Refusés in 1863 (see fig. 4). “The outrage that this painting provoked when first exhibited,” writes Susan Grace Glassi, “centered as much on its indecipherable subject as on the obvious impropriety of a naked woman mingling with fully-clothed men in broad daylight. Even more than its subject, Manet’s simplified and direct.mes ans of representation, as seen in the summary treatment of the background, the minimal amount of modeling of the nude, and the lack of integration of the figures and the setting, offended contemporary viewers” (Susan Grace Glassi, Picasso’s Variations on the Masters, Confrontations with the Past, New York, 1996, p. 186). Over a several year period, from 1959-61, Picasso would create his own versions of Manet’s painting in a variety of media (see fig. 5).

The palette of Manet’s painting and Picasso’s variations on this theme are recalled in the palette of L’Étreinte. Marie-Laure Bernadac, in her analysis of the present work, writes “… we can detect a clothed man, and a woman wearing a beret with a pom-pom and a pointed shoe; the green and black colors recall the Déjeuners sur l’herbe series, inspired by Manet, in 1962. It is as though the dressed talking man could at last embrace the nude sitting woman” (Marie-Laure Bernadac, Art is Never Chaste, p. 13). Indeed there is a narrative element present in this work that is in keeping with Picasso’s challenging of the Old Masters. The very conceit of nudes in a landscape had previously only been allowed when clothed in the armatures of mythology or religion. Bathsheba could be naked because it was a biblical story, the same way Venus could emerge from the ocean on a shell in Botticelli’s work as a representation of Roman myth. But even works that seemed to relatively frankly depict the human body would hide and obscure certain portions. Boticelli’s Venus uses her cascading mane of hair to discreetly cover her pubic mound while Adam in Hendrick Goltzius’s The Fall of Man is draped with a convenient leaf, despite the fact that he and Eve do not yet realize their naked state (see fig. 6). One can imagine Picasso’s amusement at L’Étreinte being a final conclusion of Eve's provocatively held apple of knowledge in Goltzius’s work.

Picasso’s intimate works from his final decades, while daring and graphic, also speak to a deeper romanticism and contentment. Married to a devoted wife and companion, living in the south of France and focusing deeply on his work, his embracing couples from these years meld together, not with the near violence of his more youthful works but with something quite close to pure tenderness. Between 23 October and 10 December of 1969 Picasso created twenty-eight paintings on the theme of the kiss, including the present canvas. Works such as Le Baiser meld man and woman, using a relatively chromatic palette to convey the dream-like quality of the painting (see fig. 7). This embrace calls on similar sent.mes nts as Klimt’s The Kiss and Brancusi’s limestone evocation of the same name (see figs. 8 and 9).

Where the male figure is concerned, especially in Picasso's late works, there is always a level of ambiguity as to how much the artist himself is conflated with his sitter. His musketeers and matadors, satyrs and sailors can all be seen as variations on Picasso himself. This is even more apparent in his crescendo of artist and model paintings of the 1960s. The artist painting his model. These figures kissing and embracing, then, are simply one step further. The canvas within the canvas has been removed and the artist fully inhabits his model. There is no longer any distance between the two nor any distance between the artist and his male avatar in the canvas. In L’Étreinte the male figure's striped shirt clearly alludes to Picasso himself while the abstracted area where his head meets the tree echos the straw hat he ports gaily in photographs and paintings from prior decades (see figs. 10 and 11). Picasso here is both an actor in the scene and the voyeur painting it.

L’Étreinte was included in the first of two exhibitions at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. The idea originated in the autumn of 1969 in conversations between the artist and Yvonne and Christian Zervos who suggested the possibility of a show focusing on a single year of the artist’s work. The exhibition—with the paintings hanging in the majestic surroundings of the Gothic Palais des Papes— became legendary. With 165 canvases, hung somet.mes s two or three deep along the walls of the palace, the effect was extraordinary (see fig. 12). This exhibition and the one that followed in 1973 were a grandiose stat.mes nt in the best tradition of Picasso’s oeuvre; not only were Picasso’s creative energies undiminished, with age he had found a new freedom and reached new heights of creativity. As he told Pierre Daix shortly afterwards: “If I’m painting better, it’s because I’ve had some success in liberating myself” (quoted in Pierre Daix, Picasso. Life and Art, London, 1994, p. 365). L’Étreinte held pride of place in the first Avignon exhibition and was also featured during the artist’s lifet.mes as a full-page illustration in both Klaus Gallwitz’s publication Picasso at 90 and Christian Zervos' catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.

Filled with an exuberant, bold energy the present canvas is a physically-monumental test.mes nt to the final act of one of history’s greatest artists. The present work is one of the artist's largest format canvases from the period, adding to the sense of physical impact. L’Étreinte, in keeping with the best examples of the work of Picasso’s final decade, though painted more than fifty years ago, feels completely contemporary in its direct dialogue with the artists of the later part of the twentieth century as well as the figurative movement of today. Francis Bacon, for example, widely credits seeing Pablo Picasso's work as being a driving impetus in becoming an artist. In works such as Two Figures with a Monkey of 1973, Bacon takes the melding of embracing figures to new extremes of voyeuristic confrontation (see fig. 13). L’Étreinte, set in the leafy greenery of an ambiguous Eden, is more tender than Bacon's couple, laying upon a bed which looks more like an operating table. For while Picasso's late works serve to shock they also show a painter who sees, in his later years, an embracing couple as emblematic of not just instinctual urgency but also a degree of emotional tenderness in all their imperfect glory.