“[Jacqueline] peoples Notre-Dame-de-Vie with a hundred thousand possibilities […] She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases. All the portraits are like her, even if they are not like each other. All the heads are hers and there are a thousand different ones.”
—Hélène ParmelinExecuted towards the close of 1964, after Picasso and his last great paramour Jacqueline Roque had married and taken up residence at Notre-Dame-de-Vie above the small town of Mougins, Tête d'homme et nu assis belongs to the artist’s late series of works intensely focussed on the complex intimacy of the artist and model relationship. So preoccupied was Picasso with this theme that he worked at a prodigious rate in these months, producing some thirty five canvases in the November of 1964 alone. Alongside sister works including L’Artist et son modèle now held as part of the permanent collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the present work represents the maturation of a project that Picasso had first began in earnest in the spring of 1963 and would conclude in the early months of 1965, although of course the roots of this preoccupation ran considerably deeper. Coming to auction for the first time, the work remained in Roque’s personal collection until passing to her daughter Catherine Hutin-Blay on her death in 1986, and exemplifies the key formal and thematic qualities of Picasso’s painting from this period.
 

At once diminutive and commanding, the seated nude occupies the right side of the composition, the openness of her contorted pose and intensity of the gazing male’s scrutiny of her underscoring her status as an erotic object. Depicted in profile, the emphasis on the male’s gazing eye combines the identities of artist and lover here, the distinctly Cubistic treatment of her form combining multiple perspectives in a single pose in a manner that recalls his early and incendiary nude ensemble, Les demoiselles d’Avignon. As in that foundational work, here the conflation of art and eroticism extends beyond the straightforward resolution of a pictorial problem and touches on more complex personal reflections on masculine desire and ageing, the relationship between virility and creativity, and the question of his own artistic legacy. The two figures separated by expressive waves of paint, Tête d'homme et nu assis stages the agonised ache of desire, of wanting to dissolve the boundaries separating self and other. As is typical of these works, Tête d'homme et nu assis is characterised by its distinctive palette of creamy greys, pinks, and whites counterpointed by more dazzling accents of emerald green, shades especially associated with Picasso’s last great muse Jacqueline, unmistakably inscribed here in the model’s dark, almond shaped eyes, high cheekbones and sweep of raven hair.

 

‘Époque Jacqueline’ and Les Femmes d’Alger

 

Following their first meeting in the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris in the South of France in 1952 Picasso was immediately struck by Roque’s statuesque beauty, his successful pursuit of her as both muse and lover ushering in a period of emotional stability and creative outpouring that defines the artist’s triumphant last act or what John Richardson has described as his ‘Époque Jacqueline’. Marrying in 1961, Roque remained a constant source of support and inspiration until Picasso’s death in 1973 and was to be more widely represented in his work than any other previous lover.  “They lived in a world of his own creation where he reigned almost as a king yet cherished only two treasures – freedom to work and the love of Jacqueline”
—David Douglas Duncan

As is evident in the pose and treatment of Jacqueline here, Picasso saw in his last muse a great resemblance to the odalisques of Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique, and it was this inspiration, coupled with the death of his close competitor Henri Matisse, that motivated the artist to commence work on what would prove to be one of his most sensational series – Les Femmes d’Alger. Taking Delacroix’s work of the same title as its source, Picasso reworked the famous 19^th century harem scene over the winter of 1954-55, producing fifteen oil paintings and volumes of related drawings and prints as he pushed the possibilities of painterly reinterpretation to their limits. With incredible inventiveness and variety, Picasso pitted himself against the legacy of Delacroix and the great tradition of French painting, testing his place within this lineage. 

 

Announcing Jacquline’s supreme position within his own ‘harem’, this series would establish the conceptual grounds on which Picasso would work for the next decade, reinterpreting art historical masterworks by Édouard Manet, Diego Velázquez, and Nicolas Poussin as he reaffirmed his own place in this illustrious history. This sense ‘that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco, and the rest, as well as all the modern painters […] are all standing behind me watching me at work’ would persist beyond the artist’s more direct engagement with the Old Masters, driving this late period of creative production on to new heights.ⁱ Leaving this important series behind in 1963, Picasso immediately immersed himself in this new body of work focussed almost exclusively on the enigmatic artist and model relationship. Closely related to his thinking about the Western art historical canon and his place within it, these works allowed Picasso to combine oppositions between male and female, artist and muse, the classical and the contemporary. A kind of visual shorthand for the complex exchanges between eroticism and creative production, in turning to the charged artist and model relationship in the last decade of his life Picasso not only considered his place amongst the Old Masters but interrogated the very act of looking itself. 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Painted towards the close of 1964, the present work belongs to Picasso's late series of works focussed on the artist / model relationship. Stylistically and thematically, it is highly representative of this period, known as his 'Époque Jacqueline' after his last muse and partner Jacqueline Roque, whose likeness can be clearly seen here.The work remained with the artist during his lifetime, passing into Jacqueline Roque's collection following his death and then on to her daughter Catherine Hutin-Blay in 1986.
   
• Commenced in 1963 and concluding in the spring of 1965, the theme of the artist and model dynamic preoccupied Picasso almost exclusively through 1964. Immediately following his decade-long interrogation and reinterpretation of old masters including Delacroix, Manet, and Velázquez, in this later series Picasso continues to consider his own identity as an artist and his relationship to a great canon of Western art, as well as reflections on ageing, masculine desire, and the relationship between virility and creativity.
   
• Picasso's work is currently the focus of a major exhibtion, Picasso for Asia: A Conversation, hosted by M+ in Hong Kong. the show marks the first time that a museum collection from Asia is in dialogue with masterpieces from the Musée nationale Picasso-Paris.  

 

 

ⁱ Pablo Picasso, quoted in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso Plain: An Intimate Portrait, New York, 1963, p. 77.