‘Man Watching his Sleeping Female Companion [Man Looking at a Sleeping Woman] is a small work—done in pencil and oil on the lid of a cigar box—probably executed during summer 1922 at Dinard. The stylistic language is characteristic of Picasso’s “neoclassical” period, when, constantly referring to art history, he turned more openly towards the models of antiquity. The picture also reflects Picasso’s interest at this time in nineteenth-century painting, itself imbued with the ideals of antiquity.
The subtle balance of the composition, the approach to drawing and the idealization of the nudes are evocative of, for example, Ingres—a reference frequently mentioned by contemporary critics to describe Picasso’s new way of painting. In fact, the sensual pose of the sleeping young woman, her head resting on the curve of her raised arm, explicitly echoes the French master’s Bathers and Odalisques, which were themselves inspired by Giorgione’s figures of Venus. In the same vein, Rosenblum drew the comparison between Picasso’s male figure and that of Augustus in Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia and Livia (1819; Brussels, Musées Royaux). Picasso probably saw this painting at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, and again in 1921, at the great Ingres retrospective in Paris.
The importance of drawing for painting was established by the first Academies, and up to the end of the nineteenth century painters would often draw their subjects naked before “clothing” them with Paint and smoothing out all the visible signs of preparatory work to complete the picture. This is a method Picasso inverted, cleverly setting the abstract power of the line against the smooth flatness of the red ground and the illusionistic contours of his male nude. In other ways, the underlying lines and the partial use of oil recall certain pictures by Jacques-Louis David, which, unlike Picasso’s works, would have been considered unfinished in the academic context of the late eighteenth century. One example is Bonaparte (1797-1798; Paris, Musée du Louvre), shown in Paris in 1913, another, the monumental Tennis Court Oath, in which the pencil lines are incomplete and only a nude, four faces and a few hands have been painted in oil. Research has not so far been able to establish categorically that Picasso saw the work before 1921, but the idea cannot be rejected, considering the interest he later showed in The Death of Marat (1793; Brussels, Musées Royaux) and The Sabines (1796-1799; Musée du Louvre, París), two of David’s masterpieces that Picasso was to reinterpret in 1931 and 1962-3 respectively (Rape of the Sabine women [after David], Mougins, 4, 5 and 8 December 1962. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, París). […]’.
Text: Cécile Godefroy in GODEFROY, Cécile y Marilyn McCully (dirs.). Pablo Picasso: 43 Works. [Cat. Exp.: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010, p. 66-71.
