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Lot Essay
This work is sold with two photo-certificates: one from Maya Widmaier-Picasso and one from Claude Picasso.
Tête d'homme is an exuberant picture executed by Picasso in a medium that had become hugely important to him during the 1950s and 1960s - children's crayons. His discovery of their potential, with their bold colours unmixed and burning ardently on the sheet of paper, apparently came about when he had played with his children Claude and Paloma during the 1950s. In Tête d'homme there is an almost childish exuberance that itself appears to declare the influence of these children on, their father, the aging master. The directness and intensity of a child's vision provided a refreshing inspiration to Picasso, and led to his claim that, 'When I was a child I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to draw like a child' (Picasso, quoted by H. Read in The Times, 26 October 1956).
It was a little later, during the early 1960s, that Picasso created his famous series of studies in crayon of his wife Jacqueline, whom he married in 1961, there greatly and which resemble Tête d'homme in stylistic terms. In this work, the staring eyes of the subject fix the viewer in an arresting and even confrontational gaze. This bearded man appears to be one of the satyr-like or musketeer characters from the infinite repertoire of Picasso's own personal pictorial universe. During his later decades especially, Picasso filled his works with an array of people - real, mythological, historical and impossible, who embodied a sense of joyousness, of celebration. With the wriggling lines of crayon appearing to burst with colour like fireworks before us, Tête d'homme has tapped into a direct current of life. This is made all the more apparent in the intensely gestural manner in which it has been rendered, a combination of Picasso's flawless draughtsmanship and an intense expression of exertion and movement. It is in seeing the traces of these exertions that we feel closer to Picasso, linked to his movements on the day that he created this image.
Tête d'homme is an exuberant picture executed by Picasso in a medium that had become hugely important to him during the 1950s and 1960s - children's crayons. His discovery of their potential, with their bold colours unmixed and burning ardently on the sheet of paper, apparently came about when he had played with his children Claude and Paloma during the 1950s. In Tête d'homme there is an almost childish exuberance that itself appears to declare the influence of these children on, their father, the aging master. The directness and intensity of a child's vision provided a refreshing inspiration to Picasso, and led to his claim that, 'When I was a child I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to draw like a child' (Picasso, quoted by H. Read in The Times, 26 October 1956).
It was a little later, during the early 1960s, that Picasso created his famous series of studies in crayon of his wife Jacqueline, whom he married in 1961, there greatly and which resemble Tête d'homme in stylistic terms. In this work, the staring eyes of the subject fix the viewer in an arresting and even confrontational gaze. This bearded man appears to be one of the satyr-like or musketeer characters from the infinite repertoire of Picasso's own personal pictorial universe. During his later decades especially, Picasso filled his works with an array of people - real, mythological, historical and impossible, who embodied a sense of joyousness, of celebration. With the wriggling lines of crayon appearing to burst with colour like fireworks before us, Tête d'homme has tapped into a direct current of life. This is made all the more apparent in the intensely gestural manner in which it has been rendered, a combination of Picasso's flawless draughtsmanship and an intense expression of exertion and movement. It is in seeing the traces of these exertions that we feel closer to Picasso, linked to his movements on the day that he created this image.