A sleeping beauty arcs across the bottom of the vast canvas, breasts akimbo, the curve of her gorgeous thighs echoing the arms that are flung in surrender above her head. The colours are curiously cool for a painting with such heat: a dark, dark blue, deep green and, for the body in ecstasy, a curious, marble-like mauve. Pablo Picasso never chose the easy route. “I would love to paint like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels,” he said in the spring of 1932. And so he did. He completed “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” (pictured above, in a photograph by Cecil Beaton) in his Paris studio in a single day that March. It is among his most erotic works.
This picture is not just mysterious, but baffling. Blue fabric is draped across the back, held up by four orange buttons. At first glance it looks like a stage backdrop; it could also be a curtain, shutting out the world. The woman seems to be sunk in a dream of post-coital pleasure. Behind her an elevated plaster bust looks on – not down at the naked figure as you might expect – but past an array of rounded, long-stemmed green leaves out to a point beyond the edge of the painting. Look closer: to the left of the bust, embedded in the curtain's blue folds, is a second profile with lips parted. This face is definitely looking down. Suddenly we are unsure whether the two faces represent the act of looking or of imagining. Is the woman being watched by another or dreaming of herself? The uncertainty is part of the allure.
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