The present large-scale composition is one of four female nude drawings that Picasso completed on September 1st, 1969 and it is by far the most explosive. The electric combination of blues, yellows and greens is characteristic of the palette he employed in crayon works from this period, but an additional sense of energy is generated in this work through the dynamic three-way contrast between the reserve areas of the sheet, the zigzagging lines of the background and the controlled, densely worked medium in the upper-right, which has all the concentrated tone of a woodblock print.

Picasso’s first reclining nudes of the 1960s lie on a divan and are seen in profile. “Then, in 1967, he swings the body round to give a frontal view, while keeping the face in profile. This perspectival view, and the foreshortening that places the soles of the feet in the foreground of the picture, makes it necessary for him to arrange the parts of the body around a central focus, which is the vulva” (Marie-Laure Bernadac, “Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model,” in Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 79). Unlike many other twentieth-century artists, Picasso considered his young wife Jacqueline as a muse rather than hiring a professional model, adding another layer of intimacy to his works from this period, blurring the distinction further between viewer and voyeur.

As noted by an uncomfortable reviewer of the 1988 Hirsch & Adler exhibition for the New York t.mes s: “These are deeply and strikingly personal drawings. It is as if, by looking at intricately detailed fantasies of young women rendered by the old artist, we are stealing a peek at someone's diary, invading Picasso's privacy” (Michael Kimmelman, “31 Late Drawings By Picasso in a Show,” in The New York t.mes s, February 5, 1988). These late motifs carried over from year to year often have precisely logged dates which reinforce the impression of “a continuing epic drama,” as Jeffrey Hoffeld comments, the disembodied sheets as much of a chronicle as illuminated manuscript pages in “the liturgy of Picasso’s picture cycle” (Jeffrey Hoffeld, “Picasso’s Endgame,” in Picasso, The Late Drawings (exhibition catalogue), Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1986, p. 7).

“No doubt about it, Picasso’s ‘super-real’ (his word) women are threatening” writes John Richardson, who posits that these massive, visceral creatures with their “terrible toes and banana-sized” fingers as challengers to the air-brushed cultivated image of the female that had come to the fore in the 1960s (John Richardson, “L’Epoque Jacqueline,” in Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London 1988, p. 42). Picasso’s nudes, who “expose themselves in a matter-of-fact, unerotic way, threatened a generation nurtured on art that had been deodorized and sanitized, a generation that had mostly turned away from reality except in the gimmicky or eye-fooling forms of pop-art or photo-realism” (ibid., p. 42).