Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Saidenberg Gallery, New York (by the 1960s)

Acquired from the above

Hélène Parmelin, Picasso, Intimate Secrets of a Studio at Notre Dame de Vie, New York, 1966, illustrated p. 127

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1964, vol. 24, Paris, 1971, no. 196, illustrated pl. 72

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 64-192, illustrated p. 58

For several months in 1964, Picasso returned to the theme of a man smoking. As Jean Sutherland Boggs has observed: "When in 1964 Spitzer, a Berlin publisher, sent Picasso a packet of reproductions of one of his own paintings of an artist, he proceeded to make variations of it – painting curly-haired painters, bearded painters, clean-shaven painters, painters with square hats, painters with flattened fedoras – some young, some old but all working with manic intensity on their canvases, all surprised by the results. At the same time he was making drawings of the heads of other people with equal fervor. One series was of a man, often smoking (Picasso himself seems to have been an incessant smoker). In drawings of this man Picasso combined particularly brilliant calligraphic motives of different colours to suggest a distraught human being. From this series there is also a deeply melancholy portrait of Jacqueline. But the difference is that these other works do not contain a canvas or a sheet of paper, which seems to provide a resolution – or at least an excuse – for the excitement of the painter" (Jean Sutherland Boggs, The Last Thirty Years, Picasso in Retrospect, 1973, p. 235)

With the exception of one drawing executed on May 27, 1964 the sheets in this series all represent single figures. In the present work Picasso juxtaposed two heads, one fully bearded and the other with a light stubble. The focal point of the composition is the extraordinarily sculptural hand of the smoker on the right, drawing deeply on his cigarette.