“He had often spoken to me of making his own version of The Women of Algiers, and had taken me to the Louvre on an average of once a month to study it. I asked him how he felt about Delacroix. His eyes narrowed and he said, ‘That bastard. He’s really good.’”
Great collects ors: The (Art) World According to Hubert Neumann
Pablo Picasso’s Deux nus was created by the artist in the middle of July 1962. Two female nudes, one reclining in apparent slumber, the other upright and gazing directly at the viewer, show the artist’s mastery of the drawn line, while his use of colored crayons heightened with white adds a sculptural volume to each of their forms. Throughout the course of the year, Picasso had created numerous works featuring female nudes, artists and models, portraits of his wife and muse Jacqueline Roque and a number of compositions deriving from Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. By July he focused on a series of intimate interior scenes featuring two figures, interchangeable pairings of a man and woman or of two women. In all of these compositions the figure at right appears to recline or sleep, while the figure at left takes a more active, seated posture.
Fig. 2 Eugène Delacroix, Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appart.mes nt, 1834, Musée du Louvre, Paris
The origins of this composition can be traced back to Picasso's series from six years earlier, Les Femmes d'Alger (see fig. 1). Picasso began his reinterpretation of Delacroix's famous composition (see fig. 2) shortly after the death of his longt.mes friend and artistic rival Henri Matisse. With this series, Picasso was not only attempting to elevate himself to the ranks of the great French painters Delacroix and Ingres, but he was also responding to the influence of Matisse and the chromatic richness of his odalisques, whose drapery and bright patterning within Matisse’s enchanted studio setting was legendary (see fig. 3). As Susan Grace Galassi writes, "In the Women of Algiers ... various artistic presences are synthesized. Likewise, Picasso's series encompasses multiple modern idioms, while Delacroix is 'altered' to accommodate Velázquez, Ingres, and Matisse. Picasso's own seminal, early masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, for which Delacroix's painting served as a source, hovers as a reference throughout the series.... The subject of the harem itself is fused with the studio and the brothel to become an allegory of creation. Thus, the Romantic impulse toward the continual expansion of boundaries is absorbed and carried out in Picasso's response, in which every element is transformed into something else" (Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso's Variations on the Masters, New York, 1996, p. 147). Deux nus is a clear inheritor of the stylistic concerns of this famous series.
Adorned with vibrant wax crayons, Deux nus remains one of Pablo Picasso's most engrossing sketches of the 1960s. Out of the sixteen studies of two nudes that he completed between 16 and 27 July 1962 (Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. XX, Paris, 1968, nos. 327-342), only six, including the present work, were treated with such elaborate attention and heightened with colored crayon.
The present work has never before been offered at auction. Acquired—in all likelihood directly from the artist—by Morton G. Neumann shortly after it was created, Deux nus has remained in the stewardship of the Neumann family until today. Neumann, alongside his wife Rose, began collects ing in the 1940s and created an unrivaled modern art collects ion with particular focuses on Picasso, Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti and Fernand Léger.
Image courtesy of the Neumann family.
