Standing Nude Woman

‘In the summer of 1909, Picasso returned to the continuous faceting of the Three Women, deploying it in numerous portraits of his companion Fernande Olivier. In the intervening months, he experimented with a variety of formal languages, such as the “flayed” figure of the 1908-1909 Bather. In contrast, Braque’s work displayed a more consistent evolution. Working primarily in the genres of still life and landscape, he used faceting to achieve an ever-greater integration of the pictorial surface.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Three Women, Paris, 1908. Museo Estatal del Ermitage, San Petesburgo © Photo Scala, Florence © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024 and Pablo Picasso. Bather, winter 1908-1909. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest © 2024. Digital Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

In 1910, the dialogue between the two artists became more intense, and, together, they radically transformed Cubism. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, an insightful critic of Cubism as well as the two artist’ dealer, place “the decisive advance which set Cubism free from the language previously used by painting’ in Picasso’s work of the summer of 1910. Here, Kahnweiler wrote, he “pierced the closed form”. In the Three Women, and in his paintings of the summer of 1909, the facets formed a continuous skin enclosing and uniting the figures. In 1910 works like Standing Nude Woman (Mademoiselle Léonie), Picasso pierced this skin, allowing individual planes to float freely in a shadowy space recalling Rembrandt and Velázquez. The body ceased to be a mass and instead became a hollow volume, interpenetrating with the emptiness around it. It seems to have been Braque who introduced vertical and horizontal bands aligned with the edges of the picture plane, giving a structure to space and providing a scaffolding to which Picasso’s free-floating planes could be attached.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Standing Nude Woman (Mademoiselle Léonie), Paris, summer-autumn 1910. Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Madrid © FABA Foto: Hugard & Vanoverschelde Photography © Succession Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Picasso’s work of the summer and fall of 1910 is dominated by three main series of drawings and paintings. One cycle depicts a three-quarter-length figure holding, variously, a guitar, a mandolin, or an oar. A second group, also completed at Cadaqués, depicts a full-length standing nude. Dialogues with Picasso includes a small oil sketch for this figure [Standing Nude Woman, Cadaqués or Paris, summer or autumn 1910]. The final version is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC [Nude Woman, 1910]; although almost life-size, it verges on abstraction, and can be “read” only by reference to the oil sketch and related drawings.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Nude Woman, 1910. National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund © Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

The third series emerged from the project of creating four etchings to illustrate Max Jacob’s brief novel Saint Matorel, to be published as an art book by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer. Picasso began work on the project in July 1910 at Cadaqués, and continued after his return to Paris in late August or early September. The four etchings comprise a still life on a table, a convent, and two images of Mademoiselle Léonie, a character in the novel. One, a standing nude, was executed at Cadaqués; the second, an image of the same character reclining on a chaise longue, was completed some months later in Paris’.


Text: KARMEL, Pepe (dir.). Dialogues with Picasso. Collection 2020-2023. [Exh. cat. Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020, p. 104.