Description:
nude; woman
Label Text:
During the early 1920s, Picasso worked simultaneously on his well-known Cubist still-lifes and on classical figure studies, such as "Seated Nude." The rounded, full forms and deeply-set eyes of the model in this painting conform to a classical ideal of beauty established in ancient Greece. In the years after World War I, many European artists, including Picasso, embraced the simplicity and order of classicism as an antidote to the destructiveness of war.
The inspiration for this painting may have been the Jazz Age socialite Sara Murphy. Sara and her husband, the Precisionist painter Gerald Murphy, were the models for the characters of Dick and Nicole Driver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "Tender is the Night." They met Picasso in 1921 and their families became especially close in the next two years, sharing beach outings on the Antibes. Picasso scholar William Rubin considers the many paintings from this period of a woman with classical features and wavy hair to be portraits of Sara.
Picasso limited his palette to several shades of earthy red and modeled his figure using subtle variations of tone. The graceful, relaxed position of her hands and her down turned head suggest that the artist has caught her in a moment of contemplation. He painted this work at Dinard, in Brittany, where he spent the summer of 1922 with his wife Olga and son Paolo.
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