PICASSO / Manet : Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

On the back of an envelope from the Simon Gallery, probably in 1932, Picasso wrote: “When I see Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, I think to myself, ‘Pain for later.’” Written statements by the artist about painters or their works are extremely rare. This one is all the more exceptional in that it refers to a specific painting; it projects the artist into an indeterminate future, yet one that is sketched out in this announced rendezvous.

During his career, Picasso revisited Cranach, Poussin, Velázquez, Rembrandt, David, Delacroix, and Courbet. But his experiment with Manet's painting is undoubtedly the most profound and complex he ever undertook. Manet himself already took inspiration from Titian's Concert Champêtre for the composition of the original "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" in 1863. If the confrontation between Picasso and his icons is already announced as early as 1932, it will only be in 1954 that the artist will start to work on the motif of the Déjeuner : creating sketches of the different characters of the original, and then starting his own variations and interpretations.

In August 1959, Picasso returned to Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, around which he produced six drawings. He sometimes isolates characters, such as in the linocut "Femme nue à la source", a 1963 variation on this theme. The more he works on the theme, the more and more abstracted the compositions becomes, just as for his previous reinterpretations of Las Meninas by Velasquez.

The subject was subsequently treated on canvas, in linocut, and finally in ceramics, transforming itself each time. Manet was the first to break with tradition at the same time as he moved back towards the museums and his masters. Picasso knew that it was precisely between this naked woman, embodying tradition, and the man in modern dress embodying the painter, even all painters, that the dialogue with the painting began.