This portrait of the artist playing the clarinet and cradling a naked, sleeping Marie-Thérèse is one of the most accomplished works of Picasso’s entire clarinet or flute player series. First appearing in Picasso's work in 1932, the clarinet player is a faun-like figure, a master of sensuality, who foreshadows and predates by several months the arrival of the Minotaur as the artist's alter-ego. The idyllic reverie evoked by the two lovers contrasts with the heady atmosphere, shrouded in damp, black smoke, in which the two figures appear to float. This juxtaposition reflects the two sides of Picasso's private life in the autumn of 1932: on the one hand, a profusion of pleasure and art in his clandestine love affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, and on the other the stormy jealousy of Olga Picasso and the hopelessness of being trapped in a loveless relationship.

From a stylistic point of view, Picasso takes inspiration for his composition from Ingres and from the extraordinary Odalisque à l'esclave (fig. 1), a work which obsessed him at this t.mes . However, the way in which the sleeping nude is distorted and the figures are detached from the background comes from Matisse, who, as his retrospective in July 1931 at the Galerie Georges Petit had demonstrated, was emerging as Picasso's only artistic rival. The renewed creative life that Marie-Thérèse's love breathed into all of Picasso's work here encourages him to suggest a new, totally unifying poetic, evoking the great masters of painting, as well contemporary artists and real-life characters: “Picasso was 50 years old. Youth and age, innovation and tradition, all amount to pre-destined motifs for Picasso, instilling from the very beginning a Neo-Classical ideal, to be renewed in a sexually charged version, which symbolizes his own artistic fertility” (Exh. Cat., Paris, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris, Matisse Picasso, 2002-2003).

Le Joueur de clarinette was executed in Paris, yet the classical roots of its composition extend back to Boisgeloup, the château north of the capital where the couple spent a great part of the early 1930s. As Picasso was still married to Olga at the t.mes , Marie-Thérèse would move into the château during the week, while on weekends, she would go home to Maisons-Alfort, and Olga would play the chatelaine. In a glade on its grounds, however, the artist set up a sculpture of Marie-Thérèse as Daphne, the nymph who was cleverly metamorphosed into a bush to preserve her purity. Though their Dionysian affair was certainly nothing if not erotic, in comparison to the tempestuous Olga, raven-haired and passionate, Marie-Thérèse was an ethereal presence in the artist’s life, her youthful charisma, flaxen hair and voluptuous figure inexhaustible sources of artistic rejuvenation in the face of his stifling marriage. Indeed, speaking about her predecessor in Picasso’s affections, Françoise Gilot has noted that, “I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other… Marie-Thérèse brought a great deal to Pablo in the sense that her physical form demanded recognition” (quoted in Michael Fitzgerald, “A Question of Identity,” Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse, New York 2008, p. 12).