Over the course of Picasso’s intrepid career, a few singular years stand out in the pantheon of the artist’s achievements. One looks to 1907 for the arrival of Cubism announced by Picasso’s revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or to the 1937 reveal of the monumental and politically charged Guernica, and even to 1966 when parade of matadors and musketeers materialized in the artist’s studio—but there is perhaps no other year which rivals the intensity, ardor and sensuous rapture of 1932.
Pablo Picaso, circa 1930, Paris, Photo AFP/AFP via Getty Images
By the t.mes Nu devant la glace was created on June 26, 1932, Picasso’s life (and thereby his art) was consumed by the passions of his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a woman twenty-eight years his junior. As the legend goes, Picasso first.mes t Marie-Thérèse in 1927, having spotted her in the streets of Paris near the Galeries Lafayette. Embolded by the Surrealist notion of l’amour fou—the concept of an obsessive, all-consuming love transcending all reason—Picasso approached the young woman. As Marie-Thérèse later recalled, the artist took her by the arm and said, “’I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together,’” thus setting in motion a love affair which would alter the course of each of their lives and change the face of Modern art history (Marie-Thérèse Walter quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women, 1994, p. 143).
The subsequent summers of 1927 and 1928 were furtively spent together at beaches in Cannes and Dinard, while, in between their trysts, Marie-Thérèse was secreted away in bathing cabins and youth lodgings as Picasso played the role of doting bourgeois husband to Olga Khokhlova. His sketches from this period reveal a wealth of coded homages to his young lover, her initials secretly embedded in his stylized drawings. By 1931, however, Picasso could no longer contain the creative impulse that his lover inspired, especially as his marriage to Olga grew increasingly strained. His works from this period alternate from the violent harpy-like depictions of his wife (see fig. 1) to the languorous and seductive portrayals of his “Golden Muse,” Marie-Thérèse (see fig. 2). From December of 1931 through 1932, Picasso turned his obsessive eye towards his mistress, creating some of the most hypnotic and alluring images of his career. The sensual paintings of Marie-Thérèse from this t.mes are as pivotal in Picasso’s oeuvre as masterworks like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, heralding a completely new idiom which would define his paintings going forward.
“There is no doubt that 1932 marks the peak of the fever-pitch intensity and achievement, a year of rapturous masterpieces that reach a new and unfamiliar summit in both [Picasso’s] painting and sculpture.”
This period of voracious desire and creative fervor coincided with the lead up to Picasso’s first ever retrospective, hosted at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in June and July 1932 (see fig. 3), and later at the Kunsthaus Zürich from September to November. Picasso was integral to the design of the exhibition and personally selected his recent Marie-Thérèse portraits to hang alongside his earlier renowned Cubist and Surrealist compositions, signifying the importance of these works within his oeuvre. Michael Fitzgerald discussed the famed 1932 exhibition, stating “Picasso’s focus on…the suite of paintings he made from December 1931 through April 1932, created the impact of a ‘master’—both of the past and of the present… The gathering at Petit showcased his dominance of the grand tradition of figure painting, a mode that enabled him to answer Matisse and slip past him in a dialogue with previous masters. In this cavalcade of great canvases, aesthetics seemed paramount, and references to other types of experience, especially contemporary life, appeared limited to sensual pleasures” (Exh. Cat. Kunsthaus Zürich, Picasso. His First Museum Exhibition 1932, 2010-11, p. 133).
The retrospective was a huge success, and prominently featured numerous large-scale portrayals of Marie-Thérèse. It was on this occasion in Paris that Olga, upon seeing the undeniable references to a specific, unfamiliar face, was alerted to the presence of another woman in her husband's life. Until the exhibition, Picasso's relationship with Marie-Thérèse had been a secret affair, the evidence of which he had kept sealed away at the studio he maintained at Boisgeloup.
In June 1930, after some t.mes covertly shuffling back and forth from an apartment arranged for Marie-Thérèse in Paris and that of his nearby family residence, Picasso acquired the Château de Boisgeloup. Seventy kilometers from the French capital, the chateau became a refuge for the artist and his muse, one where Picasso could escape from Olga and the stresses of his failing marriage. The sprawling property dwarfed his space in Paris, allowing for greater artistic freedom. The chateau’s stables were converted into a sculpture studio where Picasso increasingly devoted his t.mes and creative energy to the three-dimensional medium, resulting in a number of plaster busts and reclining nude portraits of Marie-Thérèse. The voluptuous sculptural forms created at Boisgeloup would largely influence the paintings from 1932, which in turn replicated the fulsome curves of Picasso’s lover and reiterated the luminosity and texture of his plaster forms.
The influence of this medium is visible in Nu devant la glace in the undulating sculptural force with which the female body is portrayed. At the same t.mes , the psychological state of the sleeping woman resonates in the soft modeling of the figure, creating an atmosphere of reverie and carefree abandon. Seeking to convey his erotic desire, Picasso generates morphological permutations and distortions of the female anatomy. Abandoning any attempt at naturalism, he creates a figure composed of biomorphic forms, a technique that developed from his earlier, Surrealist works.
As is characteristic of this period, Marie-Thérèse's skin takes on a dreamy lilac hue, her rolling curves offset in the present work by electric hues of red and reiterated in her multicolored necklace. Repeating the arcs of her body, the necklace also recalls the peter pan collar so often depicted in her seated portraits—the precise object for which she was shopping when she first.mes t Picasso. Rare for this period, the present work also includes the addition of a mirror, further alluding to the famed reclining nudes of Old Masters like Diego Velázquez whom Picasso so admired. However, whereas Velázquez’ Venus (see fig. 4) seems to exist at a distance, one created by divide between her reflection and her turned body, Picasso’s somnolent supine muse is feast for the viewer’s eyes, almost palpable in her immediacy. The intimate scale of the work further enhances the tangibility of his lover, lending an increasingly personal sent.mes nt to the work.
“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions….I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done… Simply that I want nothing but emotion to be given off by it.”
Writing about the days and weeks immediately after the opening of the retrospective at Galerie Georges Petit, John Richardson describes the impact of the more intimate works like Nu devant la glace: “The day after the opening, Picasso was back working at Boisgeloup. He had the place to himself—and Marie-Thérèse. Olga and Paulo had been packed off to Juan-les-Pins; whether he ever intended to join them, he never did. The small reclining nudes of Marie-Thérèse asleep exude a tenderness and intimacy that was missing from most of the larger, more stylized portrayals that Picasso had done of her for his retrospective. Indeed, a profile of Marie-Thérèse cradling her head in her hands, silkily painted onto a small square canvas, is as loving as any of his images of her. With their flipper limbs and gorgeous buttocks, and free-and-easy facture, these little paintings—mostly done while the show was still on—constitute a touching epilogue to the daunting set pieces of the winter and early spring” (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume III, The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, New York, 2007, pp. 479-80; see fig. 5).
“How much I love her now that she’s sleeping.”
“When a man watches a woman asleep,” Picasso confessed, “he tries to understand” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881-1906, New York, 1991, p. 317). The theme of the sleeping woman recurred in a series of works that explored his mistress in different poses, either fully recumbent or seated. The image of sleep and the way in which Marie-Thérèse appears to lose herself in its oblivion links this work, via its association with the unconscious, to Picasso's most fertile Surrealist images. Roland Penrose, who was one of Picasso's Surrealist associates, said the following about these paintings: “Most of these figures painted with flowing curves lie sleeping, their arms folded round their heads... The sleeper's breasts are round and fruitlike and her hands finish like the blades of summer grass. The profile of the face, usually with closed eyes, is drawn in one bold curve uniting forehead and nose above thick sensuous lips” (Roland Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 243).
In Boisgeloup, Marie-Thérèse occupied all spaces, permeated all mediums, and decorated all surfaces, even down to small scraps of paper and unfolded envelopes (see fig. 6). Having been released into the public eye with the 1932 exhibition, her features would become more readily identifiable in Picasso's art. As Robert Rosenblum writes about the young woman's symbolic unveiling: "Marie-Thérèse, now firmly entrenched in both the city and country life of a lover twenty-eight years her senior, could at last emerge from the wings to center stage, where she could preside as a radiant deity, in new roles that changed from Madonna to sphinx, from odalisque to earth mother. At t.mes s her master seems to worship humbly at her shrine, capturing a fixed, confrontational stare of almost supernatural power; but more often, he becomes an ecstatic voyeur, who quietly captures his beloved, reading, meditating, catnapping, or surrendering to the deepest abandon of sleep" (Robert Rosenblum in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, 1996, p. 342).
Marie-Thérèse exuded potent mix of physical attractiveness and sexual naivety which had an intoxicating effect on Picasso, and his rapturous desire for the young woman brought about a wealth of images that have been acclaimed as the most erotic and emotionally uplifting compositions of his long career. Picasso's unleashed passion is nowhere more apparent than in the depictions of his sleeping muse, the embodiment of tranquility and physical acquiescence.
Intimate Picasso: Related Works in Museum collects ions
Sensual works like Nu devant la glace reign supreme as the emblems of love, sex and desire in twentieth-century art. Painted on a loving, intimate scale, the present work exists within a limited suite of related works of the same scale, the most similar of which are held in museum collects ions. Fittingly, the present work has been exhibited in nearly a dozen museum shows, the most recent of which was the acclaimed Picasso 1932: Love, Fame Tragedy exhibition at the Tate Modern, London and the Musée Picasso, Paris in 2017-18.
