Cité de la Musique - News - Helly Nahmad Gallery

This is an image of Pablo Picasso's painting titled L'Aubade (20 February 65), produced in 1965. This work was painted on 20 February 1965. This work was entitled L'Aubade (The Aubade), meaning a song or poem of awakening, this large and vitally raw painting is an extraordinarily bold and fluid working on a theme that was central to much of Picasso's late work. Depicting a frail, limp and wizened old figure attempting to awaken a far larger and extremely voluptuous female odalisque by tooting on a rather pathetic and silly-looking horn, L'Aubade presents a tragi-comic erotic scene that, like an act from some classical Greek drama, affirms the central role of eroticism in life. The two figures of L'Aubade express the paradoxical extremes of emotion that Picasso evidently experienced in the last ten years of his life and which caused him to repeatedly explore this theme in numerous depictions of the painter and the model. For Picasso in old age was both an impotent old man and the omnipotent artist whose phenomenal powers of vision and creativity remained undiminished. With his brush and paints the eighty year-old Picasso was still an adventurous hero as in his youth. The backgroun displays a green wall which contrasts with an orange floor.

Pablo Picasso, L'Aubade (20 February 65) (The Aubade (The Dawn Serenade))
Oil on canvas
129.5 x 195 cm. (51 x 76 3/4 in.)
©Helly Nahmad Gallery NY

PARIS
CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE
The Music of Picasso
September 22 - January 3, 2021

The Nahmad Collection is pleased to participate to The Music of Picasso taking place at the Cité de la Musique, Paris.

From his earliest scenes of gypsy life, flute players in the 1970s and harlequin musicians, to his cubist Guitars, collaborations with the Ballets Russes and bacchanal canvases, this exhibition explores the musical dimension running throughout Picasso’s work.