INTRODUCTION

In 1981 the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired Picasso's Nude in a rocking chair, painted in 1956 at La Californie, the artist's Belle-Époque villa overlooking the Bay of Cannes. The glamorous light, the brash colour and the effervescent materialism that we associate with the French Riviera pervade the mood of this striking image. So too, does the sheer forthrightness of Picasso who, especially in his later years and with characteristic defiance, confronted his life and imaginings with undaunted energy and without concession.

Ever since the Pompidou-Tate Gallery exhibition of 1988 - an important exhibition which finally secured the reputation of Late Picasso - it has been a curatorial ambition of the Gallery to create an exhibition which contextualises this prized painting within Picasso's oeuvre. Nude in a rocking chair is the starting point for an exhibition devoted to the powerful and inventive responses of Picasso's late work.

To the very end Picasso never flinched from the beauty, the irony and the sometime horror of truth. His late works, for so long viewed with uncertainty, can now be seen as utterly in keeping with his powerful and inventive responses to the challenge of age towards the end of a prodigious life.

Edmund Capon
Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Nude in a rocking chair 26 March 1956
Oil on canvas 195 x 130
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased 1981
© Succession Picasso, Paris, Viscopy Ltd, Sydney