Nu debout et femmes assises is among the finest of an important series of grisaille double-portraits of his mistress and muse Dora Maar that Picasso made in the coastal resort of Royan near Bordeaux shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Responding to the traumatic news of the German invasion of Poland, Picasso had hurriedly fled Paris on 1 September 1939 for the comparative safety of the town of Royan on the French Atlantic Coast. There amidst the gloom of the news of the outbreak of war between France and Germany, he set to work on a series of pictures almost all of which he executed in the grim, grisaille colours he had used for Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) and would again use for Le charnier (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) in 1944-1945. ‘I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict,’ Picasso would later say of his work of these years, ‘But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings that I have done’ (quoted in P.D. Whitney, ‘Picasso is Safe,’ in San Francisco Chronicle, 3 September 1944, in S.A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years 1937-1945, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1998, p. 13).

Between 1939 and 1944, Dora Maar became the primary vehicle through which Picasso would often express the trauma, deprivation, anxiety and dullness of the years of war and Occupation. As Elizabeth Cowling has written, the origins of this tendency began in Royan immediately after the outbreak of war in September 1939. ‘These months in Royan,’ she records, ‘were very productive, the constant pressure of mortal danger spurring Picasso on to find a way of visualizing the common anguish without resorting either to anecdote or reportage’ (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 616).