Reclining Nude

‘After talking great care to direct the installation of his first retrospective exhibition in Paris, at the Galeries Georges Petit, Picasso declined to attend the opening, on June 16, 1932. Instead, he quit the city for the Château de Boisgeloup, his country house near the Norman village of Gisors, where he resumed painting the same subject that would preoccupy him for much of the spring and summer. Not since1907, during the extensive research and planning for Les Demoiselles d´Avignon, had he devoted such prolonged attention to the recumbent full-length nude, Henceforth, however, that motif would become a constant refrain in his work, continually varied through many permutations of style and technique. The Siesta confirms the endurance of classical themes throughout Picasso´s career, as well as his capacity to renew those themes through modernist methods of his own devising.

The painted female nude, reclining in nature or in a luxurious interior, gained popularity during the Italian Renaissance. Over the course of five centuries it became a standard motif in European art and a measure of an artist´s ability to render an expanse of flesh that provoked the viewer´s tactile sense. Since academic conventions dictated a stable viewpoint, different approaches were taken to the challenge of showing both sides of the body, either depicting multiple women in different poses or, alternative, using a mirror to depict a single figure both frontally and dorsally, as Diego de Velázquez did in the so-called “Rokeby Venus” (1647-51). Picasso, too, employed these devices, but in 1932 he invented a new formula for the female nude that corresponded to the Surrealist concept of “convulsive beauty” – a strange and irrepressible attraction sprung from the subconscious and unbound by social norms [1].

Fig.1. Diego Velázquez. The toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), 1647-51.The National Gallery, London © The National Gallery, London

For Picasso, this involved violently twisting the figure to present all areas of sexual interest at once. In The Siesta, breasts, buttocks, lips, and hips are simultaneously visible in a way not found in nature. Still, a very natural air of sensuality pervades the painting, thanks to its steady rhythm of calligraphic lines that carry the eye across the canvas. Although the subject´s balloonlike physique seems far removed from the angularity of analytic cubism, it was through the cubism fragmentation of closed forms that Picasso arrived at this Surrealistic schema. Similarly, the flat colour planes of synthetic cubism provided the basis for his treatment of earth and sky as horizontal bands of green and blue.

Between these bands, Picasso placed an undulating lavender landscape in the shape of a woman [2]. Her roundness and rotundity recall the ample Earth Mother figures that enthralled the artist, particularly the paleolithic Venus of Lespugue, of which he acquired two plaster casts. After seeing these casts in the artist´s studio in 1943, the photographer Brassaï commented, “Picasso adores this first of all goddesses of fertility, the quintessence of feminine forms, whose flesh seems to swell and expand round a central core, as if aroused by the desire of man” [3].

Venus de Lespugue, c. 27.000 a.C. Musée de l´Homme, París © MNHN - JD Domenech

The artist´s desire for Marie-Thérèse Walter animates all of his nudes from the summer of 1932, and it has long been believed that she – whose features are reflected in these images – was present for their creation. Recent research by Laurence Madeline, however, indicates that this was impossible: Walter spent July and August with her sister in the south of France, far from Picasso and his family, who passed those months together at Boisgeloup [4]. This fact makes clear that The Siesta is not the contorted likeness of a live model, but rather the projection of a mental state engendered by memories of that model. To judge from the figure´s pose – wrapped in her head thrown back, eyes closed, and mouth open – those memories revolved around sexual pleasure. The present work is one of Picasso´s painted dreams of Walter dreaming of him, and its true setting is the inner arcadia of the artist´s fantasies. Moreover, the elimination of extraneous detail encourages beholders to project their own fantasies onto the composition. “You have to give whoever is looking at it means of painting the nude himself with his eyes”, Picasso later said. “Everyone will make just the nude he wants with the nude I make for him” [5].

Like The Siesta, the nudes Picasso painted later in life tended to take the representation of a woman as a point of departure into the geography of his imagination. In the case of Reclining Nude, from December 1960, that woman was Jacqueline Roque, soon to become the artist´s second wife and his constant companion until his death [6]. Here, too, he has reduced the setting to its bare essentials and stretched the figure across the length of the large canvas, so that her feet press against its right edge. The resulting monumentality is much enhanced by the strong contrast of highlights and deep shadows, which produces passages of prostitution, recession, and even elevation. Straight, curving, and parallel brushstrokes define the figure and her blanket like the contour lines on a topographical map. The pneumatic lightness and pastel palette of The Siesta may be gone, but Picasso´s vision of the female body as a living landscape remains. For parts of the previous two years, he had been dividing his time between his villa at Cannes and the Château de Vauvenargues, located of the northern side of Paul Cézanne´s favourite landscape subject, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire.

If the knees and elbows of Reclining Nude seem to jut into space with metallic stiffness, it is probably because Picasso had begun making iron and a sheet metal sculpture – a genre he had pioneered with his cubist Guitar of 1912-13 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) – and, as often in the past, was developing his ideas in two and three dimensions concurrently. Both his painted and his sculpted works of this period combine cubist faceting and Surrealist distortion to contemporize classical subjects’ [7].



[1] See DE LA BEAUMELLENET, Agnès al. (dirs.). André Bretón: La Beauté convulsive. [Exh. Cat.: Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1991]. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1991; and FOSTER, Hal. Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993.
[2] In a letter of August 29, 1936, Picasso wrote to Marie-Thérèse Walter, “I see you before me my lovely landscape MT and never tire of looking at you, stretched out on your back in the sand, my dear MT, I love you.” Quoted in WIDMAIER, Diana. “The Marie-Thérèse Years: A frenzied Dialogue for the Sleeping Muse, or the Rebirth of Picasso´s Plastic Laboratory”, in RICHARDSON, John, Diana Widmaier Picasso, and Elizabeth Cowling, L´Amour Fou: Picasso and Marie-Thérèse. [Exh. Cat.: Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2011]. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011, p.93.
[3] BRASSAÏ, Picasso et Company, Garden City, Doubleday, 1966, p.73.
[4] MADELINE, Laurence (dir.). Picasso 1932. [Exh. Cat.: Musée national Picasso-Paris, 2017]. Paris: Musée national Picasso-Paris, 2017, pp.134, 159.
[5] Picasso, quoted in PARMELIN Hélène. Picasso Says, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1969, p.92.
[6] Picasso and Jacqueline Roque married in March 1961.
[7] Commented by Ross Finocchio in: FITZGERALD, Michael (dir.). Pablo Picasso. Structures of invention. The unity of a life´s work. [Cat. Exh.: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2024]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, pp. 310-313.