L'Homme à l'agneau et musicien

At the age of eighty six, more than 60 years after the revolution of Cubism and after having continuously changed his style and subject matter, Picasso was still able to overthrow tradition, even the ones he himself had established. In the later stages of his creative career, perfectly aware of his mastery and role as a model for the younger generation of artists, he showed an overt indifference for the rules of 'good' composition and 'correct' drawing, refusing, once again, every temptation of hedonism and decoration. The starting point of his drawing, as is often the case with Picasso, is elements from the artistic tradition of the past, like the early Christian theme of the Good Shepherd. The man bearing a small animal is a subject that had fascinated Picasso in the 1940s, and that he had treated in the celebrated 1943 bronze sculpture (Paris, Musée d'Orsay). Another recurrent classic iconography is that of the dancing Satyrs, a clear precedent for the man playing the flute, whose legs are human-like, but unnaturally short. Notwithstanding the evident clins d'oeil to his classical sources, these elements are thoroughly subverted in style: the figures are freely represented and their anatomies are distorted to a point that epitomises Picasso's late rejection of the correctness of drawing. Even the composition is forced: no spatial relation is established between the two men who lie on different planes, the bearded figure pushed to the foreground, his legs cut abruptly.

The flute is considered a Dyonisiac attribute, traditionally played by Satyrs, often appearing in orgiastic scenes. Wind instruments, with their bodily and lascivious connotations, are opposed to Apollinean string instruments, associated with intellectual activity and the mathematical rules determining the length of the strings.

In this drawing, Picasso clearly displayed his Dyonisiac conception of art: this parade of classical figures, with distorted anatomies and displaced positions in space, is Picasso's personal homage to tradition. He demonstrates how it is possible to subvert the rules of the masters without refusing them - on the contrary, cherishing the examples of the past and making them his own creations.