.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers.’ – Pablo Picasso (quoted in F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 123)
An exquisite double-sided work, Picasso’s final ballad, Deux Têtes (recto) and Buste d’homme et sexe féminin (verso) imprints the artist’s lifelong journey into an emotional farewell to life, and to love. Painted on 25 July 1972, the drawing holds the two poles that had governed his art for more than half a century: the charged proximity of painter and beloved, and the unsparing confrontation of eros with mortality. Drawn at the Villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, where Picasso had lived with his wife and last great muse Jacqueline Roque since 1961, this sheet is less a study than an intimate pairing in which Picasso and Jacqueline, painter and model, eros and night, are held a turn of the sheet apart.
Its making belongs to a well-documented late chapter. Living in relative seclusion with Jacqueline and seeing only a few close friends, Picasso produced a prodigious last body of work. Accumulation and rapidity became his defense. ‘I have less and less time’, he reflected, ‘and I have more and more to say’ (M.L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model,’ in Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 85). Every work was a part of himself, a piece of life, a point gained against death. What allowed him to advance more quickly and to say more was a return to archetypal figures, heads, couples, the artist and model, and the ancestral types of Velázquez, Rembrandt and Hals. This work is a concentrated instance of that defense, a late paraphrase of European tradition through which Picasso inserts himself into the line of painters who had similarly confronted mortality through the human face.
On the recto, two heads are pressed so tightly together that they almost fuse, creating a sense of confrontation, intimacy and mutual scrutiny. The faces are widely understood as Picasso and Jacqueline. One is denser, more heavily modelled with dark hatchings, Picasso himself reduced at moments to graphic signs. The other is lighter, more linear and schematic: the muse. With a few bold strokes Picasso divides the sheet, then packs the surface with a complex web of lines. Fishbone patterns, spirals and staring eyes appear like magical symbols. The rapid yet precise markings testify to the vital energy with which the ageing draughtsman reaffirmed these two portraits. Cubism’s analytical impulse is still ever-present in the present work. The dual-head format further recalls his long fascination with simultaneous viewpoints and double images, now stripped of earlier playfulness and charged with claustrophobic proximity. Working almost entirely in black India ink, pen, brush and wash, Picasso charges the sheet with contrast rather than colour. Dense washes and heavy cross-hatching produce a brooding, nocturnal atmosphere far removed from the brighter late canvases.
Turn the sheet and the pairing is taken to its last extreme. Dated again in large, emphatic numerals, as if to mark the length of Picasso’s prodigiously productive career, the verso presents a small, extraordinary wash drawing of the female sex held in unflinching close-up. From the late 1950s, after encountering Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), Picasso’s treatment of the subject became radically frank, close-up, and stripped of idealisation. As observed by Sigmund Freud in 1905, the female sex was hardly ever recognized as ‘beautiful’ (S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Leipzig and Vienna, 1905, p. 22), and explicit, unidealised depictions remained rare in the Western canon. Yet Picasso’s insistence on showing it unflinchingly therefore constitutes a deliberate transgression of both aesthetic convention and social taboo. The drawing stands in a short, confrontational line that runs from Courbet through Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés. To the left, a small Spanish-looking man, while not a physical likeness but an unmistakable stand-in, turns his back on this monumental, self-sufficient source of life and walks, eyes open, into the darkness. One of the last erotic images of a seventy-year-long career becomes a quiet, poignant leave-taking – the end of the love story.
The front and reverse intertwine and call to one another. They form a final chapter of the artist-and-model theme that had occupied Picasso since the 1920s. Present in both registers without being named, Jacqueline appears as living companion on the recto and as archetypal, disembodied origin on the verso. Darkness binds both sides, the nocturnal hatchings of the faces and the night into which the artist walks. Love, long Picasso’s shield against mortality, is at last acknowledged as finite. Two aspects of one life held in tense proximity under the shadow of approaching death.
In the summer of 1972 Picasso produced a celebrated series of self-portraits that turn his own face into a death’s-head or mask. Deux Têtes and Buste d’homme et sexe féminin belongs to the same moment of reckoning, with this sheet becoming the starkest expression of that self-deprecating iconography. The densely worked male head on the recto and the small departing figure on the verso function as two complementary self-images: the artist still present and the artist already leaving. The work captures the sentimental expression of a motif that had occupied him for half a century, and a late modernist memento mori produced when younger artists had already turned toward Conceptualism, Minimalism and Pop. Picasso remained committed to the human figure, the erotic body, and the confrontation with death, themes he carried, on both sides of a single sheet, into the final moments of his life.
An exquisite double-sided work, Picasso’s final ballad, Deux Têtes (recto) and Buste d’homme et sexe féminin (verso) imprints the artist’s lifelong journey into an emotional farewell to life, and to love. Painted on 25 July 1972, the drawing holds the two poles that had governed his art for more than half a century: the charged proximity of painter and beloved, and the unsparing confrontation of eros with mortality. Drawn at the Villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, where Picasso had lived with his wife and last great muse Jacqueline Roque since 1961, this sheet is less a study than an intimate pairing in which Picasso and Jacqueline, painter and model, eros and night, are held a turn of the sheet apart.
Its making belongs to a well-documented late chapter. Living in relative seclusion with Jacqueline and seeing only a few close friends, Picasso produced a prodigious last body of work. Accumulation and rapidity became his defense. ‘I have less and less time’, he reflected, ‘and I have more and more to say’ (M.L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model,’ in Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 85). Every work was a part of himself, a piece of life, a point gained against death. What allowed him to advance more quickly and to say more was a return to archetypal figures, heads, couples, the artist and model, and the ancestral types of Velázquez, Rembrandt and Hals. This work is a concentrated instance of that defense, a late paraphrase of European tradition through which Picasso inserts himself into the line of painters who had similarly confronted mortality through the human face.
On the recto, two heads are pressed so tightly together that they almost fuse, creating a sense of confrontation, intimacy and mutual scrutiny. The faces are widely understood as Picasso and Jacqueline. One is denser, more heavily modelled with dark hatchings, Picasso himself reduced at moments to graphic signs. The other is lighter, more linear and schematic: the muse. With a few bold strokes Picasso divides the sheet, then packs the surface with a complex web of lines. Fishbone patterns, spirals and staring eyes appear like magical symbols. The rapid yet precise markings testify to the vital energy with which the ageing draughtsman reaffirmed these two portraits. Cubism’s analytical impulse is still ever-present in the present work. The dual-head format further recalls his long fascination with simultaneous viewpoints and double images, now stripped of earlier playfulness and charged with claustrophobic proximity. Working almost entirely in black India ink, pen, brush and wash, Picasso charges the sheet with contrast rather than colour. Dense washes and heavy cross-hatching produce a brooding, nocturnal atmosphere far removed from the brighter late canvases.
Turn the sheet and the pairing is taken to its last extreme. Dated again in large, emphatic numerals, as if to mark the length of Picasso’s prodigiously productive career, the verso presents a small, extraordinary wash drawing of the female sex held in unflinching close-up. From the late 1950s, after encountering Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), Picasso’s treatment of the subject became radically frank, close-up, and stripped of idealisation. As observed by Sigmund Freud in 1905, the female sex was hardly ever recognized as ‘beautiful’ (S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Leipzig and Vienna, 1905, p. 22), and explicit, unidealised depictions remained rare in the Western canon. Yet Picasso’s insistence on showing it unflinchingly therefore constitutes a deliberate transgression of both aesthetic convention and social taboo. The drawing stands in a short, confrontational line that runs from Courbet through Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés. To the left, a small Spanish-looking man, while not a physical likeness but an unmistakable stand-in, turns his back on this monumental, self-sufficient source of life and walks, eyes open, into the darkness. One of the last erotic images of a seventy-year-long career becomes a quiet, poignant leave-taking – the end of the love story.
The front and reverse intertwine and call to one another. They form a final chapter of the artist-and-model theme that had occupied Picasso since the 1920s. Present in both registers without being named, Jacqueline appears as living companion on the recto and as archetypal, disembodied origin on the verso. Darkness binds both sides, the nocturnal hatchings of the faces and the night into which the artist walks. Love, long Picasso’s shield against mortality, is at last acknowledged as finite. Two aspects of one life held in tense proximity under the shadow of approaching death.
In the summer of 1972 Picasso produced a celebrated series of self-portraits that turn his own face into a death’s-head or mask. Deux Têtes and Buste d’homme et sexe féminin belongs to the same moment of reckoning, with this sheet becoming the starkest expression of that self-deprecating iconography. The densely worked male head on the recto and the small departing figure on the verso function as two complementary self-images: the artist still present and the artist already leaving. The work captures the sentimental expression of a motif that had occupied him for half a century, and a late modernist memento mori produced when younger artists had already turned toward Conceptualism, Minimalism and Pop. Picasso remained committed to the human figure, the erotic body, and the confrontation with death, themes he carried, on both sides of a single sheet, into the final moments of his life.