Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Sale: Christie’s, New York, November 10, 1987, lot 67
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1965 à 1967, vol. 25, Paris, 1972, no. 120, illustrated pl. 74
The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture.  The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 65-138, illustrated p. 202

Like most of Picasso’s late paintings, Deux hommes nus et enfant assis has its origin in the subject of a painter and his model.  In a series of large canvases, Picasso developed a number of variations on this theme, always characterized by a great spontaneity in brushwork and coloration, and an extraordinary creative energy.  Never tiring of exploring visual means of depicting aspects of sexuality,  Picasso’s figures are seen in various costumes and performing various double-entendre activities.  In the present work, the painter has been transformed into a flute player; the flute has replaced the paintbrush and music has replaced painting. 

Between 1965-67, Picasso completed a series of paintings, drawings, and lithographs based on the theme of the mythical god Pan and scenes of bacchanalia (see fig. 1).  The present work is from a series of oils that present a flutist rhapsodically playing his instrument (see fig. 2).  Usually, the secondary character in these compositions is a female love interest, but in this work and another painted on the same day (see fig. 3), his central characters are both men.  Depictions of fraternization between men are rare in Picasso’s oeuvre and appeared most notably during his Rose Period at the beginning of his career. Returning to the theme at the end of his life, the artist now relishes in portraying these figures as jubilant and carefree – the fantasy, perhaps, of an old man’s yearning for his bygone youth.  At the time he completed the present work, Picasso was in his late 80s (see fig. 4).   It is believed that these pictures, featuring a virulent, playful and often flirtatious male figure, were meant to embody the artist’s lost vigor.   This depiction, as well as the others like it that Picasso completed around this time, were understood to be disguised portraits of the artist himself.

Gert Schiff has written about the significance of these pictures, observing how they offer an escape from the struggles of everyday life in a manner similar to Gauguin’s pictures of his Tahitian paradise: “Here the old artist revives one last time that dream which Paul Gauguin had impressed so forcibly upon his generation: the flight from civilization.  To think there are whole peoples who lie in the sand and pipe upon bamboo canes!  To think that it should be possible to rid oneself of all norms and necessities of modern life, of the curse of individuality – to live a life without memory, hence without death; to come into being and disintegrate like a plant and to span the interim safely embedded in the mythical collective of a primitive society.  Could it be that the brain itself is the result of a faulty development?  This question seems to lurk behind those large paintings [like the present work] in which Picasso transforms his bucolic figures into budding primeval giants” (Gert Schiff, Picasso, the Last Years, 1963-1973 (exhibition catalogue), The Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, 1983).

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Homme à agneau, musicien, coq et enfant à la pastèque, January 20, 1967, colored crayon, Private Collection 

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, L’Aubade, 1967, oil on canvas, sold: Sotheby’s, New York, November 2, 2004, lot 34

Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, Deux musiciens II, May 21, 1965, oil on canvas

Fig.4, Photograph of the artist at age 88