PARIS, FRANCE.-Through a generous donation by Bernard and Almine Ruiz Picasso, Nude Woman, Three-Quarter Back View (oil on canvas, 75 x 53 cm, 1907) joined the collection of the Musée Picasso on 24 May 2005. It is a highly significant work because it belongs to the set of drawings and painted studies linked to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, now in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. It has the same primitive characteristics as the works executed early in 1907, revealing Picasso’s interest in African art and Iberian sculpture: the detail of the large ear is taken from one of the heads carved in the third century BC that is now in the Musée d’Archéologie nationale, in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It emphasises the method used by Picasso, who, fascinated by faces and bodies, approached his subject from different angles, exploring side, three-quarter, front and back views before crystallising them in a single image, as shown in the crouching girl on the right of the New York painting.

To celebrate the acquisition of this work which coincides with the museum’s twentieth anniversary, the Musée Picasso is presenting the set of works related to the genesis of the Demoiselles d’Avignon, at the same time as its exhibition Picasso. A Love of Drawing. The set includes the seven sketchbooks which show how Picasso worked on the composition and the care he gave each figure; drawings of the naked women, the sailor and the medical student; and painted studies, mostly women’s faces, which will be presented alongside African and Oceanic works that Picasso liked to have around him and which he claimed were witnesses rather than models. An exhibition organised by the Musée Picasso and the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris.