Pablo Picasso - Erotic Sketches - 2006

Another in the Prestel series of erotic sketches by famous artists; Pablo Picasso.

First published in German in 2006, this is the first English edition. Harder to find than most of the Prestel series.

Good essay by Norbert Wolf to accompany the sketches.

Shipping: insured with tracking.

About the Erotic Artwork of Pablo Picasso

The career of the greatest painter of the 20th century Pablo Ruiz Picasso (b. 1881, d. 1973),was played out in the shadow of Eros – and of Thanatos. At the age of eight Picasso’s drawings already displayed a precocious interest in the female form, and in the days leading up to his death he was still working obsessively on sketches of the female sex. At the turn of the century the young Picasso created drawings and watercolours inspired by the bordellos of Barcelona which he frequented. These works mix desire, fascination, but also comedy and the grotesque alongside the ever-present fear of disease. They would result, seven years later, in his masterpiece, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, from the crucial period starting in 1904, when Picasso moved to Paris, to the completion, in the spring of 1907. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a depiction of five prostitutes that is regarded as one of the most important paintings in the history of modern art.

A number of erotic works dating from the late 1920s and early 1930s reflect his interest in Surrealism, which advocated the reconstruction of nature according to one’s imaginative fantasies. For Picasso, these fantasies were often of a sexual nature – “Why not the sex organs in place of the eyes, and the eyes between the legs?” he once wondered – and the result is a series of hybrid and often playfully erotic creatures. In Figures by the Seashore (1931), for example, some protuberances and orifices are anatomically recognizable, some are not; but collectively the entwining forms are an eloquent expression of sexual union. In addition to drawings and paintings, the exhibition also includes a number of sculptures dating from the artist’s Surrealist phase, including The Couple (1930), Head of a Woman (1931) and Bather (1931).

The erotic works produced during the last decades of Picasso’s life – a time when the artist enjoyed a celebrity unmatched in the annals of modern art – often reflect an increasing awareness of his own mortality and the inevitable waning of his sexual powers. Many of these are self-mocking and broadly humorous, such as collages in which a drawn image of a knock-kneed old man with glasses and a beret ogles and fondles photographs of pinup girls cut from magazines (1957). (Indeed, the tabloid press had made much of his liaison with the young painter Francoise Gilot, begun when he sixty-two and she was twenty-one). Similarly humorous in tone, but very different in source, are the group of ceramics (1962) with crudely painted images of aging “excited” satyrs in pursuit of fleeing nymphs, clearly intended as caricatures of erotic scenes on Greek vase painting.

The erotic works of Picasso include overall drawings formal and informal, sketches in notebooks hidden in drawers and private collections, and occasionally paintings and sculptures. They have been shown in a major exhibition 2001 in Paris, Montreal and Barcelona: “Picasso Erotique” a unique examination of the central theme of Picasso’s work. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. Most of his erotic work can be seen at the Musée Picasso, Paris and the Museo Picasso in Barcelona.