Pablo Picasso demonstrated an unwavering and perpetually renewing creativity throughout his life. In the summer months, he would retreat to Mougins on the French Riviera, creating a fascinating drawing encompassing his entire oeuvre's essential themes and stylistic innovations. He used colored chalk to create a womanly figure in strong, confident strokes and achieved tremendous conciseness and expressiveness through this reduction to linear forms. All this reveals Picasso's extraordinary graphic gift and a profound exploration of the human figure he pursued throughout his life. For Picasso, the female body in particular – a characteristic expressive deconstruction in the present work – is not just a motif with a long tradition in art history. However, it is a central theme and creative driving force behind his constant examination of form, eroticism, and existence. This sheet from his late creative period is a particularly brilliant example of Picasso's draftsmanship. The loose, continuous stroke is a testament to his impressive spontaneity and confident movement, with which he captured the sensual sensations of the moment. In a deconstructive and synthetic process, Picasso assembled the body from its essential features: face, eyes, orifices, breasts, and curves, imbued with an inner dynamism, combined to create a harmonious and closed form. At the same time, the soft, rippling lines, interspersed with small organic forms framed by short lines, allow for associations with marine flora and fauna. The lightness of the bright colors gives the impression that the drawing, dated July 25, 1970, has absorbed the warmth and light of that day in the artist's life.

In Picasso's oeuvre, the female nude occupies a unique position. His muses, most of whom were also his life partners, had a crucial influence on his artistic production and repeatedly initiated new paths. They are models and sources of inspiration, appearing in his works as symbols of the creative process. One of his most important groups of motifs, in which, not least, his relationship with the young Marie-Thérèse ultimately triggered an intensive examination of the body, is the bathers, with which the subject found its way into his work in Dinard, Brittany, in the 1920s. Initially, he approached the human body in a sculptural and surrealistic way and continued his exploration of its endless facets in his paintings and drawings. The intimacy and closeness to his models allowed him freedom, evident in his liberated depictions. In 1961, he married his last partner, Jacqueline Roque, and moved into the Villa Mas Notre-Dame de Vie in Mougins near Cannes. In this drawing, Picasso crystallizes the essence of a summer with unadulterated ease, erotic fascination, and a lustful, graphic appropriation of a carefree and liberated physicality. [KT]