Pablo Picasso

Avignon, Palais de Papes, Picasso 1970-1972, 1973, no. 62
Munich, Galerie Thomas, Picasso, 1983
Berlin, Kongresshalle, Die Kunst 1988, 1988
Balingen, Stadthalle, Pablo Picasso, Portrait-Figurine-Skulptur, 1989, no. 89
Zürich, Galerie Art Focus, Picasso, 2000

Picasso's mistresses were the inspiration for many of the paintings and drawings of women that he completed throughout his career. Usually, the identity of the individual on whom he based his picture can be deciphered by the particular physical characteristics or objects that he commonly associated with each of his lovers.   This striking picture from 1971, however, seems to be a composite of the many women who enriched the artist's life.  At the time he painted it, Picasso was involved with Jacqueline, his second wife and final love interest before his death in 1973 (see fig. 1).  The curves of Jacqueline's dark eyebrows and almond-shaped eyes are recognizable in this picture, but the streak of blonde hair evokes the image of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso's lover in the 1930s and the mother of his daughter, Maya (see fig. 2).  Although during the late 1960s and 1970s Picasso painted many musketeers in brightly-plummed hats, the bonnet in this picture is reminiscent of the hat worn by Dora Maar in several of Picasso's portraits of her from the late 1930s (see fig. 3).   And the chair that the figure sits in, with its circular spindals, is similar to the chair featured in many portraits of Françoise Gilot from the 1940s.  One can only guess that Picasso, who would turn ninety in September of that year, may have been driven by nostalgia to incorporate into this painting all of the great loves of his life.

Gert Schiff wrote about these compositions from the end of Picasso's career, pointing out that they were the gleenings of nearly a century of his life's work: "To the last, he poured all his impassioned humanity into his art.  Thus, his last works teach us something that cannot be deduced from the more detached works of other giants in their old age.  By pushing the limits of our self-awareness a little further, Picasso undermines our moral complacency in the name of his own honest and fearless humanism.  Quite often, he does so with disarming naiveté and exquisite humor.  For all of these reasons, his last period has a special place within his development.  It is not a 'swan song' but the apotheosis of his career" (Picasso, The Last Years, 1963-1973 (exhibition catalogue), Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University, New York, pp. 11-12).

Picasso painted the present work on June 27, 1971.  The day before, he had completed another Buste de femme, which was much more paired down and abstract (see fig. 4). Writing about Picasso's pictures of women,  Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot and Marie-Laure Bernadac have noted, "One of Picasso's characteristics, compared to Matisse and to many other twentieth-century painters, was that he used his own wife as model and muse.  He rarely used a professional; it was the woman he loved, with whom he shared his daily life, who was his model.  What he painted, then was not a 'model' woman but the woman-as-model.  This difference had consquences in both the emotional and the pictorial realm, for the beloved woman is the painting and the painted female is the beloved woman; thus no distance is possible.  Picasso never painted from life, however; Jaqueline did not pose for him, but she was there, everywhere, always present.  Every woman of those years was Jaqueline, and at that time, they were rarely portraits.  The image of the woman he loved was a model inscribed deep inside himself, one that emerged every time that he painted a woman..." (Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot and Marie-Laure Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 444).

Shortly after Picasso's death in 1973, Jacqueline arranged for Picasso's last great works to be exhibited at the Palais des Papes in Avignon.  The exhibition, which hung in this great Gothic ediface in the south of France, included many of Picasso's paintings of muskateers and portraits of nude women, including the present work. 

Fig. 1, Photograph of Jacqueline Roque Picasso, circa 1970. 

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Marie-Thérèse Leaning on One Elbow, 1939, oil on canvas, Maya Ruiz-Picasso Collection, Paris

Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, Head and Shoulders of a Woman with a Striped Hat, 1939, oil on canvas, Musée Picasso, Paris

Fig. 4, Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme, 1971, oil on canvas, Private Collection