Bold, gestural and elemental, Tête d’homme stands as a powerful testament to the inventiveness of Picasso’s late period, in which the artist expressed a renewed vigor through the power of color and line. Painted in December 1964, this work is exemplary of Picasso’s embrace of a strikingly direct visual language, defined by an economy of means and an intensity of gesture. It is both primal and highly sophisticated—a tour de force of painterly immediacy.
In Tête d’homme, the male face is reduced to its most essential elements in black contours: piercing eyes, a beard composed of rhythmically spaced dots, and calligraphic dashes for nose, brow and mouth. The figure’s architecture is constructed from assertive ribbons of primary and secondary colors, each stroke infused with a sense of purpose and surety. In the figure’s abstracted physiognomy and frontal confrontation with the viewer, we sense the legacy of the mask-like visages Picasso first encountered through African and Oceanic sculpture, as well as echoes of ancient Mediterranean traditions—mythic, heroic, and timeless.
This painting belongs to a vibrant cycle of late works in which Picasso returned obsessively to the theme of the male bust, often imbued with qualities of the musketeer, matador, or Mediterranean sage. Bust-length portraits such as Tête d’homme anticipate the majestic full-length depictions of 1969, projecting the same authoritative presence and conviction found in masterworks like Homme et enfant (see fig. 1).
In this sense, Tête d’homme is both an image and an assertion: a painterly emblem of identity, channeled through the charged syntax of line and color. The composition’s dynamic asymmetry, its calligraphic immediacy, and its bold chromatic contrasts anticipate the gestural bravura of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georg Baselitz, while remaining unmistakably rooted in Picasso’s lifelong investigation of the human face as a site of psychic and formal invention (see fig. 2).
With its vigorous brushwork and mythic resonance, Tête d’homme stands as a triumphant expression of Picasso’s late genius—a declaration of artistic vitality forged at the outer edges of abstraction, expression, and lived experience. Held in the Picasso family since its creation 60 years ago, Tête d’homme from the Collection of Marina Picasso comes to auction for the very first time.
