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PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Nu debout et deux hommes signed “Picasso” (upper right) and dated “24....

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:75,000.00 - 100,000.00 USD
PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Nu debout et deux hommes signed “Picasso” (upper right) and dated “24....

PABLO PICASSO

(1881-1973)

Nu debout et deux hommes

signed “Picasso” (upper right) and dated “24.7.72.”

(lower left and lower right)

ink and gouache on paper

23.5 x 31.8 cm (9 1⁄4 x 12 1⁄2 in.)

executed in 1972

Estimate: £50,000–70,000

$75,000–100,000



Provenance

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (acquired from the artist)

R.S. Johnson International Gallery, Chicago

Acquired from the above by the present owner on May 2, 1973




Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso: 172 dessins en noir et en couleurs 21 Novembre 1971-18 Août 1972, December 1, 1972-January 13, 1973, no. 142 (illustrated in colour, p. 95)




Literature

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1983, vol. 33 (Oeuvres de 1971-1972), no. 477 (illustrated, pl. 164)

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This voluptuous and alluring work, executed at the very end of Picasso’s life, and showing the artist in full command of the use of light and dark tints, something which relates this sheet to the artist’s late etchings and aquatints, is one of many compositions which deal with the theme of musketeers.
Gert Schiff has analyzed the significance of the subject at this stage in Picasso’s career: “ In December 1966 an army of seventeenth-century soldiers invaded Picasso’s pictorial world. These soldiers of fortune, soldier-adventurers, Spaniards of the Golden Age, he referred to colloquially as “musketeers”…Where did Picasso’s musketeers come from? Apart from a lifelong love of masquerade, they came out of childhood memories. Returning to his beginnings as he did in so many ways at the end of his life, Picasso may have remembered certain drawings that he had done in 1894, at the age of twelve, after his first visits to the theatre. These show the typical sort of cloak and dagger character that might be used to illustrate many of the works of Lope de Vega…However, their immediate source was disclosed by Jacqueline in conversation with Malraux: ‘They came to Pablo when he’d gone back to studying Rembrandt’” (Gert Schiff, Picasso, The Last Years, 1963-1973, New York, 1983, pp. 30-31).