Image: Pablo Picasso. The Siesta, Boisgeloup, August 18, 1932 © FABA Photo: Éric Badouin © Succession Picasso, Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2024
Museo Picasso Málaga has made Pablo Picasso’s ‘La siesta’ its Artwork of the Month, posting a short video and a commentary on 18 August 2026 — the ninety-fourth anniversary of the date the painting itself carries.
The museum’s own page for the work describes it as an oil on canvas made at Boisgeloup and dated 18 August 1932. It shows Marie-Thérèse Walter lying naked on the grass in full daylight. The museum reads her closed, crescent-moon eye as a symbol of pleasure, and the ecstatic face and body as signs of a complete harmony with nature; Picasso had met Walter in 1927, and by the summer of 1932, while Olga and Paulo were in the south of France, she dominated his painting.
The commentary sets the picture against the retrospective staged by the Galerie Georges Petit in June 1932, where Picasso showed some thirty recent canvases painted between December 1931 and April 1932, about twenty of them depicting Walter asleep, reading or in bust form. The museum’s Spanish text — fuller than its English translation — compares her posture of pleasure with the one the Surrealists chose in their pursuit of ‘amour fou’, citing Salvador Dalí’s photomontage ‘El fenómeno del éxtasis’, published in 1933 in issue 3-4 of the magazine Minotaure. It also notes John Richardson’s suggestion that Jean Painlevé’s early underwater films may lie behind the fishtail shape of the right foot and the elasticity of the pose. The text is by Cécile Godefroy, from the museum’s 2017 catalogue ‘Pablo Picasso. New Collection 2017-2020’.
‘La siesta’ is one of the commented works in ‘Pablo Picasso: estructuras de la invención. La unidad de una obra’, the collection presentation at the Palacio de Buenavista running from 19 March 2024 to 30 January 2028. Mounted through the collaboration between the museum and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA), it brings together 144 works and is curated by Michael FitzGerald, Kluger Family Professor of Art History at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
