Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Galerie Agnes Lefort, Montreal
Galleria Medusa, Rome

C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso: Oeuvres de 1959 à 1961, vol. 19, Paris, 1968, p. 83, no. 267 (illustrated)
Helly Nahmad Gallery, Picasso - Artist of the Century, London, exhibition catalogue, 1998, p. 115, no. 52 (illustrated in colour).
Picasso - Artist of the Century, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, 1999, p. 115, no. 73 (illustrated in colour).
Helly Nahmad Gallery, Braque, Gris, Léger and Picasso: Cubism and Beyond, exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, no. 54 (illustrated in colour).
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture; The Sixties I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 60-157, p. 56 (illustrated).
Picasso in the Nahmad Collection, exhibition catalogue, Monaco, 2013, p. 130 (illustrated in colour).

Throughout Pablo Picasso’s career as an artist, the figure remained his preferred subject. As a boy his painter father arranged for him to work from the model in his own studio, and those sessions prompted an early realisation that this traditional subject offered the young Pablo the possibility to create endless variations both in form and meaning in his art. At any given moment thereafter, the majority of drawings, paintings and sculptures that he produced - and there were thousands and thousands of them - were devoted to the figure, more often than not the nude. While Picasso’s figure compositions often refer to the physical presence of the people - especially the women - who shared his life, these same works also reveal a broader frame of reference, which includes both mythology and the history of art.

Early in his career, Picasso had acquired a reputation as an artist for whom the figure was at the core of his revolutionary approach to representation itself. From cubist analysis to surrealist distortion, the figure was subjected to his artistic probing on all levels. Among Picasso’s most remarkable depictions of the figure are those in which the urgency with which they are painted conveys the sense that the artist, now approaching ninety, seems to be racing against time - in fact, a race against death. In these works, the figure represents the sexual longing of an old man and voyeur, but the nude also evokes her longstanding importance in Picasso’s work during his prolific career.

Picasso claimed to have received the odalisque, the grand orientalist tradition of the reclining nude, as a legacy from Henri Matisse upon the latter’s death in 1954. Picasso’s treatment of this theme, however, often takes the viewer to a place Matisse had hardly ever travelled. Hélène Parmelin has written. “The admirable nudes of Matisse have no sex, just as they have no glances. The nudes of Picasso have a glance and a sex. The sex of a nude is for him an essential part of the body whose reality he seeks… If Picasso praises love, he makes no bones about it” (H. Parmelin, Picasso: The Artist and His Model, New York, 1965, p. 158).