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Lot Essay
In 1961, Pablo Picasso moved to the idyllic Villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie in the South of France with his devoted wife Jacqueline, where he would remain, blissfully content for the rest of his life. In these final decades, Picasso was able to reflect on the overwhelming success of his career to date, and yet his creative zeal would continue to blaze brightly. His pictorial output during these years was extraordinarily prodigious, and incessantly innovative: “I have less and less time,” the artist declared, “and I have more and more to say” (quoted in M.-L. Bernadac, "Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model" in Late Picasso; Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 85). Painted on 1 November 1964, Le Peintre (Tête) belongs to this exceptional period. The composition depicts a painter at work on a canvas. The artist’s subject matter is hidden from the viewer—only the tacks or nails that adhere the canvas to its stretcher lie within our eyeline. The protagonist’s youthful age is belied by his jet-black hair, and the light hint of a beard, conveyed by the artist’s innovative sgraffito technique, where Picasso made dancing, staccato incisions into the oil paint. Though he appears in three-quarter profile, the dark, gleaming pupils of his eyes meet the viewer’s gaze with a striking frontality and directness, placing the onlooker into the role of his subject, as if it is us he paints.
The year 1964 proved to be one of irrepressible creativity for Picasso, and, in the fall, he became transfixed by the relationship between painter and model, embarking on a series of paintings that explored this subject in a number of variations. Some of these depicted both model and painter together, while others, like Le Peintre (Tête), are renderings of painter alone. For Picasso, such a theme naturally involved a degree of self-examination—at this time he was in his eighth decade, and ever more aware of his own mortality. This prompted him to look back at his unprecedented artistic successes, contemplating the legacy he would leave. His works on this theme are therefore laced with a powerful poignancy and act as personal musings on himself and his life. In the present work, the protagonist sports a striped blue top, a marinière, or Breton shirt, Picasso’s characteristic attire. This garment reinforces the implication that Le Peintre (Tête) is a self-portrait. Though Picasso was in a more mature stage of life, the male presence who appears in the present work, as well as the other compositions on this theme, is consistently a younger man. Perhaps this is a representation of the youthful vigor that, despite the artist’s advancing years, had not waned, or perhaps it is a reflection of how he saw himself, and how he wished to be remembered.
Le Peintre (Tête) is infused with a rich and vivid liveliness, a bold vitality that is emphasized by Picasso’s judicious choice of color and his playful exploration of texture. So too do his energetic brushstrokes and sgraffito lines reflect the artist’s undiminishing zest for life. Through his juxtaposition of the oil-paint daubs and short darts of sgraffito with the continuous sweeping incisions that carve out the outline of the painter’s profile, Picasso imbues the painting with a thrumming sense of rhythm. Swirls of thick paint on the figure’s face create an impasto effect, the three-dimensionality exaggerated by the scraped lines. Picasso’s innovative approach to texture challenges the boundaries of the medium itself, resulting in an sculptural-relief like quality, furthering the physicality of the subject. The positioning of the protagonist, in three-quarter profile, along with the striking angularity of the sgraffito scores that Picasso uses to delineate the painter’s facial features, recall the artist’s 1907 proto-Cubist self-portrait, Autoportrait à la mèche, now held in the Národni Galerie in Prague (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 8). When Picasso painted Le Peintre (Tête), he was a world-renowned celebrity, his own works published widely: in magazines, books and newspapers. This diffusion of his paintings, as well as photographs of himself and his own self-portrait doubtless made him consider his own identity more intensely, probing into what it meant to represent himself.
Picasso’s Le Peintre (Tête) has been on display for the past twenty years at The Morohashi Museum of Modern Art in Fukushima. Named after Teizo Morohashi, the founder of XEBIO Corporation, the museum opened in 1999, driven by Morohashi’s desire to widen accessibility to art. Today the museum holds the third largest collection of Salvador Dalí’s paintings in the world, as well as an extensive collection of significant works by key modern and contemporary painters.
The year 1964 proved to be one of irrepressible creativity for Picasso, and, in the fall, he became transfixed by the relationship between painter and model, embarking on a series of paintings that explored this subject in a number of variations. Some of these depicted both model and painter together, while others, like Le Peintre (Tête), are renderings of painter alone. For Picasso, such a theme naturally involved a degree of self-examination—at this time he was in his eighth decade, and ever more aware of his own mortality. This prompted him to look back at his unprecedented artistic successes, contemplating the legacy he would leave. His works on this theme are therefore laced with a powerful poignancy and act as personal musings on himself and his life. In the present work, the protagonist sports a striped blue top, a marinière, or Breton shirt, Picasso’s characteristic attire. This garment reinforces the implication that Le Peintre (Tête) is a self-portrait. Though Picasso was in a more mature stage of life, the male presence who appears in the present work, as well as the other compositions on this theme, is consistently a younger man. Perhaps this is a representation of the youthful vigor that, despite the artist’s advancing years, had not waned, or perhaps it is a reflection of how he saw himself, and how he wished to be remembered.
Le Peintre (Tête) is infused with a rich and vivid liveliness, a bold vitality that is emphasized by Picasso’s judicious choice of color and his playful exploration of texture. So too do his energetic brushstrokes and sgraffito lines reflect the artist’s undiminishing zest for life. Through his juxtaposition of the oil-paint daubs and short darts of sgraffito with the continuous sweeping incisions that carve out the outline of the painter’s profile, Picasso imbues the painting with a thrumming sense of rhythm. Swirls of thick paint on the figure’s face create an impasto effect, the three-dimensionality exaggerated by the scraped lines. Picasso’s innovative approach to texture challenges the boundaries of the medium itself, resulting in an sculptural-relief like quality, furthering the physicality of the subject. The positioning of the protagonist, in three-quarter profile, along with the striking angularity of the sgraffito scores that Picasso uses to delineate the painter’s facial features, recall the artist’s 1907 proto-Cubist self-portrait, Autoportrait à la mèche, now held in the Národni Galerie in Prague (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 8). When Picasso painted Le Peintre (Tête), he was a world-renowned celebrity, his own works published widely: in magazines, books and newspapers. This diffusion of his paintings, as well as photographs of himself and his own self-portrait doubtless made him consider his own identity more intensely, probing into what it meant to represent himself.
Picasso’s Le Peintre (Tête) has been on display for the past twenty years at The Morohashi Museum of Modern Art in Fukushima. Named after Teizo Morohashi, the founder of XEBIO Corporation, the museum opened in 1999, driven by Morohashi’s desire to widen accessibility to art. Today the museum holds the third largest collection of Salvador Dalí’s paintings in the world, as well as an extensive collection of significant works by key modern and contemporary painters.