Seated Woman (Femme assise)

Picasso’s confident command of line is exemplified in this seemingly effortless study of a seated female nude. A youthful woman sits prostrate, her left arm anchoring her to the ground and taking her weight while her right casually rests on her raised knee. Her gentle gaze is focused on something outside the composition. She is represented with a delicate lyricism that is typical of Picasso’s most linear drawings. Consciously avoiding the variable thickness of line that a quill pen offers, Picasso has used an even pressure with a relaxed hand to produce fine, regular lines that hardly fluctuate in either width or tone. His assured command of the pen and the model’s relaxed pose lend a calmness to the drawing, while the arrangement of the model’s limbs into a square form creates a selfcontained composition of great order and rhythm. The woman’s reclining pose is one typical of the positions required of a model for traditional academic training, and also echoes the classical sculpture the artist would have seen when he travelled to Rome in 1917. This three-month trip, which Picasso undertook to work on theatre designs for the ballet Parade, spurred his interest in classicising imagery. Though he readily draws upon such motifs, his treatment is far from conventional. Rather than extensively describing the figure, Picasso deliberately omits elements, most notably her right thigh and the outline of her abdomen, encouraging the viewer’s imagination to complete these areas on his behalf. Despite the series of broken lines, minimally suggested contours and the ambiguity of where the background stops and the figure begins, Picasso’s fluent draughtsmanship produced a figure of great solidity and monumentality.