In Étude d’homme, Picasso’s lingering desires for Max Jacob are evident. There, Jacob is not only depicted nude but beckons provocatively to the artist. On the back of the sketch, painted in 1906, just before their parting, reads a poem in Jacob’s handwriting which refers to “the house where my beloved lived,” (Seckel 48). This line suggests that Jacob was still very much in love with Picasso in 1906 and that it was Picasso, not Jacob, who broke off the affair only several months later. It seems Picasso needed to separate himself from Jacob, who represented both effeminacy and “sterility.” Picasso derived his inspiration from his sexuality and he could not let this sexuality be corrupted by the emotional (and physical) self-imitation that a sexual relationship with Max entailed. Picasso’s paintings reflect his deliberate extrication from his relationship with Jacob through an increasingly masculine and un-Jacob-like aesthetic.
The male figure in Young Nude Boy (1906), though scarcely older than Picasso’s previous adolescent models, gives an entirely new impression: of awkward strength, thoughtless expression, and manifest sexuality. Gone are the folded hands over the genitals, the intoxicated or enervated posture, the grim, philosophical stare that suggested the play of emotions—between blue and rose—which corresponded to Picasso’s identity struggle. This painting is entirely roseate. The boy’s form is full and his sex quite clear indeed. Importantly, the boy does not resemble Max Jacob. Rather, out of Picasso’s life with Jacob has emerged a rawly virile youth without a feminine male counterpart. Picasso has left Jacob behind and with him, the artist’s homosexual self. The boy’s nudity suggests a physical freedom that sharply contrasts with the tight-fitting leotards and large collars of the acrobats and harlequins. But gone too is something of the personality and tragic wisdom of Picasso’s earlier models. If Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe was seduced, he was also vaguely seductive. Here he is replaced by a blunter presence, more physically manifest, but less emotionally so. The painting does not reflect the intimacy of the earlier works, which were produced at a time when Picasso seems to have enjoyed an intimacy with Max Jacob, one which, though ultimately rejected, he could not achieve with women. Rather, the figure in Young Nude Boy is, as Picasso would seem to so many women, “inaccessible” (Richardson 444).
One of the last paintings from 1906, another Young Nude Boy, represents the extreme of Picasso’s post-Jacob masculine paintings of adolescent males. The figure is boxy and cartoonish, suggesting a diminished (or suppressed) fascination with the male body. Contrast this with the voluptuous curves of Picasso’s earlier sketch of a nude Max Jacob and one becomes starkly aware not only of a lack of sexual piquancy, but also of a lack of emotional accessibility, vulnerability, or weakness. Picasso has moved far away from the lanky, feminine figures that he produced while living with Jacob and largely modeled after him. The ‘boy’ has become, rather clearly, a man, far more clearly masculine than any of Picasso’s 1905 depictions.