Executed in 1946, Femme nue debout III is a portrait of Picasso’s muse and lover Françoise Gilot, who passed away last year in June 2023. Simple, reductive lines and constructions are used to illustrate her figure in its most basic, outline form. In her memoirs Life with Picasso, when painting her, Gilot quotes Picasso as having said: ‘Of course the breasts are not symmetrical; nothing ever is. Every woman has two arms, two legs, two breasts, which may in real life be more or less symmetrical, but in painting they shouldn’t be shown to have any similarity’. (Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 118)

Nevertheless, this unadorned depiction of Gilot marks Picasso’s continual engagement with art historical references. The nude figure, in contrapposto with her arms held above her head, is reminiscent of renaissance and neoclassical depictions of Venus – Roman goddess of love, sex and fertility. Executed just 3 months after Picasso and Gilot moved in together; in the throes of the early years of their passionate, decade-long relationship, it seems fitting that Picasso chose to visually align her with the classical pinnacle of beauty.