Pablo Picasso

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Œuvres de 1969, Paris, 1976, vol. 31, no. 105, illustrated pl. 33
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture. Sixties III 1968-1969, San Francisco, 2003, no. 69-107, illustrated p. 125

Buste d’Homme belongs to the series of Musketeers that Picasso painted prolifically from 1966 to the end of his life.  Highly distorted figures, often with wide-brimmed hats, these seventeenth century characters are inspired by a lifelong love of masquerade and represent a return to his childhood visions.

As Marie-Laure Bernadac has observed: ‘In 1966, a new and final character emerged in Picasso’s iconography and dominated his last period to the point of becoming its emblem.  This was the Golden Age gentleman, a half-Spanish, half-Dutch musketeer dressed in richly adorned clothing complete with ruffs, a cape, boots, and a big plumed hat… [All] of these musketeers are men in disguise, romantic gentlemen, virile and arrogant soldiers, vainglorious and ridiculous despite their haughtiness’ (B. Leal, C. Piot and M. L. Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p.455).

The Musketeer character may have its origins in the previous decade in which Picasso worked compulsively from the old masters.  Of particular relevance here is the series of works he painted in 1957 in response to Velasquez’s Las Meninas, which addresses a number of themes that Picasso was to interpret within his own creative universe.  In his masterpiece the seventeenth century artist explores the complex relationship between the painter, his subject and the viewer.  Inspired by this, Picasso produced a series of works on the subject of the artist and his model and in some of these the artist is depicted wearing seventeenth century dress with the black, wide-brimmed hat.  The Musketeer may also allude to Don Quixote, that quintessentially Spanish embodiment of the picaresque.  The Musketeer, then, may represent the artist, the (amorous) adventurer, the soldier and, in the end, Picasso himself.

At this late period in his life the artist appears to be in dialogue with the Baroque, bravely reinterpreting it in his own breathtakingly modern stylistic language.  The bold colours and assertive brushstrokes in the present work reflect the vitality Picasso sought to capture in his Musketeer series.  Crowned with a purple plume, the regal costume is rendered in highly saturated red and yellow which, set against an orange background, suggest the blood red of the bullfighting ring and the sun-drenched landscape of Spain.