“The aesthetic and formal revolution that took place in [Picasso’s] last years... was as fundamental in its own way as the Cubist revolution.”
—Marie-Laure Bernadac

 

Exemplary of many of the pictorial and thematic concerns that characterized Pablo Picasso’s late career, Tête d'homme et nu assis is one of the final variations on a subject that preoccupied the artist in the winter of 1964. A semi-abstracted male’s head appraises a diminutive female nude, who sits cross-legged on an olive green rug. Her almond eyes and long black hair immediately identify her as Jacqueline Roque, his last love and muse, who often reminded the artist of a stunning odalisque. Their marriage in 1961 marked a remarkably fruitful and joyous period in Picasso’s life that saw his work increasingly consider male fantasy and desire. Reading as a projection of his own mind, the nude sits next to a man’s disembodied head that hovers as weightlessly as a theatrical mask. Executed the same day as a similar painting now held in Princeton University Art Museum, the present work shows Picasso contemplating his role as both a painter and lover.

 

The discrete series that includes Tête d'homme et nu assis is situated within a larger chapter of Picasso’s work from 1963–1964 that depicted artists with their models. At first, these images portrayed a painter—typically a self-portrait, as the present work likely is—on the left side, at work on a canvas. As the body of work developed, the canvas gradually began to disappear, with the painter beginning to apply his brush directly to the nude’s body. With the paintbrush entirely removed in the present work, the female finally comes to life: as in the present work, she in no longer simply an object of the painter’s creation but an embodied subject that meets his gaze. With no physical barriers remaining between reality and representation, Tête d'homme et nu assis interrogates painting’s role in mediating our perception of the world.

 

Sitting with a direct, almost confrontational gaze, the woman’s pose is evocative of the shocking nudes rendered by Édouard Manet, particularly his era-defining Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Indeed, Picasso had executed an extensive group of approximately 200 artworks just a few years earlier taking Le Déjeuner as source material, no doubt with the frequent comparisons between the artist and his forebearer firmly on his mind. “Given that Picasso had an instinctive grasp of art history, and a very clear idea of where he, Picasso, stood in relation to the past and the present, he had no problem identifying with Manet as the first modern artist, one who had set out to shock the bourgeoisie and had been pilloried for his pains, one who had been denounced for ‘shamelessness’ and ‘vulgarity’...” John Richardson expounded. “And he set out to paint nudes who would be far more threatening, far more shocking than Manet’s.”ⁱ

 

It was not just Manet’s revelatory paintings that had preoccupied Picasso’s thinking, but the wider modern canon: the previous decade of his oeuvre had been dedicated to deconstructing the iconic images of art history. “By 1963 painting had been his model for ten years, in which he had analyzed and taken apart the paintings of other artists...” the curator Marie-Laure Bernadac recalled. “Having now done all he could with subjects of general import and multi-figure compositions, he returned to his point of departure: the scene of enactment, as it were, the fundamental battleground, the face-to-face confrontation between the painter and the model. This was the decisive turning point of the period.”ⁱⁱ Having mined the history of Western painting, Picasso was left to renegotiate the very relationship at the core of artmaking: that between painter and sitter, creator and muse.

 

 “A dot for the breast, a line for the painter, five spots of color for the foot, a few strokes of pink and green... That’s enough, isn’t it? What else do I need to do? What can I add to that? It has all been said.”
—Pablo Picasso

 

Tête d'homme et nu assis also sees Picasso reduce composition to its basic elements, employing an economy of brushwork that is at once concise yet highly-stylized. A single “S” shape defines both the man’s right eyebrow and his nose; the woman’s pubic area is defined only by a “T.” Richardson clarified that these stylistic choices were meant to “preserve the directness and spontaneity of his first rush of inspiration, to be as free and loose and expressive as possible. In old age Picasso had finally discovered how to take every liberty with space and form, color and light, fact and fiction, time and place, not to mention identity.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

The zig-zags, dots, and dashes that define the figures in Tête d'homme et nu assis may teeter on the brink of abstraction, but as a figurative subject the concept of an artist with his model has reoccurred in Picasso’s corpus as early as his Blue Period. Sometimes these pictures were reflections of his passionate yet tumultuous romantic encounters; more often they were commentaries on the role of a creator and an artist’s ability to bring to life their own fantasies. Tête d'homme et nu assis encapsulates both: it is a romanticized vision of Picasso as a painter and desirer in his ebullient final years.

 

 

ⁱ John Richardson, “L’Époque Jacqueline,” in Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1953–1972, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 13.

ⁱⁱ Marie-Laure Bernadac, “Picasso, 1953–1972: Painting as Model,” Late Picasso, p. 73.

ⁱⁱⁱ Richardson, p. 42.