ROOM TEXT PANEL: SECTION 6
Artist and Model
The theme of "the painter and his model" preoccupied Picasso's late
years. It had already been announced in the Verve drawings of 1953-54,
which are shown in the first room of this exhibition. Ten years later, Picasso
began an extensive series of paintings based on the same theme, commencing in
February 1963, shortly after he took possession of a new house, Notre-Dame-de-Vie
at Mougins.
These are paintings about the act of painting. They are Picasso's allegories about his own creativity. He was fascinated by the link between artistic motivation and sexual desire. He was no less fascinated by the link between artistic disinterestedness and the sublimation or loss of sexual desire. As these images demonstrate, it is necessary for a painter to assume a disinterested attitude so that he can analyse the appearance of his model and therefore represent her image. Disinterestedness is also essential to an 'aesthetic' way of seeing. However, this same disinterestedness can lead a painter to become indifferent and even positively blind to the attractiveness and sexual promise of his model. As might be expected, Picasso tackled this theme with a great deal of ironic gusto.
In the 1953 essay accompanying the publication of Picasso's drawings in Verve
magazine, the writer Michel Leiris described the tension that is dramatised
in all Picasso's "Painter and his model" works:
'Painter and model, man and woman -- in the field of art as in that of love,
there is always a duel going on between the subject and the object, adversaries
forever facing each other and separated by a gap that no one, however great
his genius, can hope to bridge.'
Sometimes Picasso confines the painter and his model to two solitudes, separated by the vertical slash of a canvas on its easel (cat. 57, 59, 61). Elsewhere, there is no distance whatever between the painter and his model. The model and her representation are identical: the painter is stroking her with his brush (cat. 53, 54).
On other occasions, Picasso shows how a painter may "forget himself".
As he told Françoise Gilot, 'When I work I leave my body outside the
door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque' (cat.
58).
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