Jules Pascin

Jules Pascin’s preoccupation was women. Everywhere he went he liked to sponge up wine, Pernod and brandy; he liked to work with thirty or forty friends carousing about him in his studio. Mostly his subjects and companions were the girls of easy, and available virtue.

Pascin was sensuously ugly with heavy features under a perennial black derby. As he began to age, his art more and more portrayed the image of an old man teased by willing sprites. Slowly his vision of women softened to match their contours.  As his nudes grew ever more evanescent in powdery pastels, they also became even more erotic.