Pablo Picasso’s Mousquetaire buste, 1968, is part of the artist’s wider engagement of the 17^th century French King’s guard archetype from 1966 through to the 1970s. The foppish form of the curly-haired, pipe-smoking soldier was a character through which Picasso engaged with the master painters of the art historical canon, and Western myth-making in art. The features are abstracted into a cartoonish state: his eyes are lopsided, and his mustache flurried like cat whiskers. In this iteration his musketeer is a bust, the grandeur of the medium undercut by Picasso’s riotous use of greens and purples.

 

The literary, popular, and artistic references for Mousquetaire buste are as wide-ranging and varied as Picasso’s oeuvre itself. In 1966, when recovering from surgery, Picasso spent his time reading classic literature, particularly texts from the 17^th century, including Spanish Siglo d’Oro authors such as Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega, and the plays of William Shakespeare. Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (1844), a swashbuckling serial set in 17^th century France, was also, purportedly, on his reading list.ⁱ
 

Picasso probably enjoyed film versions of The Three Musketeers story, too; as a movie buff, he was “unlikely to have missed Bernard Borderie’s popular 1961 movie, Vengeance of the Three Musketeers,” which was the sixth most-watched film at the French box office that year.ⁱⁱ Beyond literature and film, though, the artist’s wife, Jaqueline, shared that the ultimate source of subject matter was deeply art historical: the musketeers “came to Pablo [Picasso] when he’d gone back to studying Rembrandt.”ⁱⁱⁱ
 

Later in life, Picasso was known to have projected slides of Rembrandt van Rijn’s masterpiece, The Night Watch, 1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, onto his studio walls, and concurrent with his mousquetaire paintings are a series of works based on Rembrandt’s compositions.^iv Picasso’s musketeers are “in a general way related to portraits by Rembrandt, even if it is not always possible to point to specific prototypes,” Gert Schiff writes.^v Picasso found inspiration, too, from royal court painters, such as France’s Philippe de Campaigne, and Spanish master Diego Velázquez. This generalized Baroque inspiration, free from any one artist or region, allowed Picasso to draw from a larger, mythic source: the tradition of Grand Master painters in Western art.
 

The mousquetaire character was a visual shorthand for the Grand Tradition of European painting, within which Picasso sought to place himself at the end of his life. Having spent the past sixty years building his career as one of the most successful and influential artists of the 20^th century, Picasso, aged 86 in 1968, surely knew that his artistic legacy would outlive him. José L. Barrio Garay noted that the Spanish term for musketeer, mosquetero, also refers to the non-paying, standing spectators in Spanish Golden Age theaters.^vi Garay observed that it was “as if Picasso were now himself a spectator in his own life and oeuvre, or as if his images had acquired the volition to create their own spectacle in his art…”^vii
 

The bust form of Picasso’s mousquetaire is particularly apt for the role of spectator. Without a body of its own, all the mousquetaire buste can do is sit on its plinth and watch the world go by. This comparison becomes particularly poignant in 1968, a watershed year for social revolutions led by young people, such as the student uprising in Paris in May, which Picasso was sympathetic to. Though Picasso would famously quip that “now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty,” he certainly knew himself to be 86, and living in Mougins, hundreds of miles from the action in Paris.
 
Thus, below the carnival-colored levity of Mosquetaire buste, there is also a sense of frustration, of a past time gone by, of being out of place. The work is ironic, in its caricature of a historical type, but also sincere, in its quotation of past masters such as Rembrandt, and in its longing to participate in the revolution from Mougins.^viii In short, the work participates in an artistic legacy greater than Picasso himself.

ⁱ Picasso: Mosqueteros, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009, p. 20.
ⁱⁱ Ibid.; “Box Office Annuel France 1961,” Box Office Story, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Jaqueline Roque [1976], quoted in Gert Schiff, Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 31.
^iv Picasso: Mosqueteros, 19.
^v Gert Schiff, Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, pp. 36-37.
^vi Ibid., 41.
^vii José L. Barrio Garay [1970], quoted in Schiff, 41.
^viii Pablo Picasso, quoted in Picasso: Mosqueteros, op. cit., p. 245.