Brimming with painterly verve, Le Peintre I is both an exuberant homage to the craft Picasso devoted his life to and a reflective exploration of his identity as an artist. Delving into one of the great motifs that dominated Picasso’s late oeuvre, that of the artist at work, Le Peintre I captures the moment of artistic inspiration. Picasso expresses the energy of the act of artistic creation through strong, gestural brushstrokes that delineate the figure of the painter, whose face is held close to the canvas in an intense moment of concentration, the paintbrush brandished before him.

During 1963-64, while working in Mougins, Picasso threw himself into the theme of the artist at work, producing a number of canvases varying between those in which the painter was the sole subject and those in which there is an accompanying model (see fig. 1). Art critic and curator Marie-Laure Bernadac has remarked upon Picasso’s zealous devotion to this theme: "Picasso painted, drew and etched this subject so many times in his life that, as Michel Leiris has remarked, it almost became a genre in itself like landscape or still-life. In 1963 and 1964 he painted almost nothing else: the painter armed with his attributes, palette and brushes, the canvas on an easel, mostly seen from the side, like a screen and the nude model, seated or reclining" (Late Picasso (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 74). In the present work, however, Picasso eliminates the presence of a model and instead shifts the focus entirely upon the artist. Haloing the figure are vibrant blocks of flat color applied with a spontaneity reminiscent of an artist’s palette. The result is a joyful evocation of the artist’s tireless imagination and demonstrates a desire for life that came to define the works of his late years.

Although not explicitly identified as a self-portrait, the subject of Le Peintre I can be read as auto-biographical. Picasso clothes the figure in a striped Breton shirt, resembling those he often wore and reinforcing the element of self-portraiture (see fig. 2). Picasso splits the painter’s face in two, duplicating the profile to examine the dual elements of the painter’s identity. In one Picasso presents a youthful figure whose brown beard complements the waves of hair on top of his head and in the other, delineated in expressive black brushstrokes, Picasso conjures a figure whose smaller beard, sharp nose and fierce expression is evocative of the musketeer. This splicing of identities anticipates the musketeers that would dominate the artist’s canvases later that decade and the synthesis with which the two characters are merged in the present work is demonstrative of how Picasso viewed the different aspects of his personality. In this portrait Picasso could be the ever youthful painter in his signature Breton top beloved in France, as well as an emblem of Spanish machismo, a hero from a Dumas novel, carrying the painterly mantle of the Old Masters.

During the 1960s Picasso had begun to turn a greater focus towards the art of the past, studying closely the works of Rembrandt, Velázquez and El Greco (see fig. 3). Journalist and art historian Hélène Parmelin has spoken of Picasso’s deep understanding of his place within the artistic canon and how the painting of others countered his artistic solitude: “Picasso is often heard to say that when he paints, all the painters are with him in the studio. Or rather behind him. Watching him. Those of yesterday, and those of today… A painter in solitude is never alone” (H. Parmelin, Picasso Says…, London, 1969, p. 40). In its allusions to the traditions of the past and its dynamic execution, Le Peintre I is a poignant commentary upon Picasso’s awareness of the rich artistic history behind him and a testament to an artist’s tireless drive for creative innovation.