CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/27/2019

Harbingers of revolution in Picasso's Blue and Rose Periods

Painted just a few months before Picasso's revolutionary "Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon," "Nude on Red Background (Young Woman with Loose Hair)" (1906) is reproduced from Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, the gorgeous new oversized exhibition catalogue from Hatje Cantz and Fondation Beyeler. In a published interview in the book, noted Picasso biographer John Richardson comments that the greatest ambiguity in the artist's work can be seen in his images of prostitutes, "which bear the stamp of instant compassion and equally of an eroticism that is sometimes sadistic." Interviewer Stéphane Guégan notes Richardson's assertion that the work of this period, "haunted by the fear, widespread at the time, of venereal disease—rarely seeks to incriminate or denounce, and that there was 'more Romantic agony than social criticism' in these images of women locked up in quarantine or of existential solitude."