Authenticated by Maya Picasso, December 29th 1982

With a certificate from Claude Picasso

Drawn in late 1901 or the early months of 1902, Nue Accroupie is a remarkable document from the crucial first year of Picasso’s blue period. Not only does it already demonstrate the stylistic resolution and thematic concentration of this period, but it also reveals much of his process at this time.
There are clear similarities between the model in the present drawing and Germaine Pichot, who became a lover of Picasso’s after she had rejected his friend Casagemas and driven him to suicide. Her heavily sensuous features are exaggerated here but there are indications in this drawing of the degree to which her appearance shaped the female archetype that recurs throughout the blue period. Certainly her role in the death of Casagemas and the ambivalence of her sexual attractiveness and her threatening voraciousness were crucial to the creation of a female type that expressed the essence of the blue period, vulnerable yet with a fragile beauty, preyed on by society yet also with the potential to prey on others.