Pablo Picasso

Jacqueline Picasso
Madame Françoise Perez (gift from the above and sold: Sotheby's, London, July 1, 1998, lot 171)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1965 a 1967, Paris, 1972, vol. XXV, no. 353, illustrated pl. 154
Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, 1964-67, San Francisco, 2002, no. 67-176, illustrated p. 330

Work is in very good condition. Slight crease to extreme upper left corner. Some natural fibers inherent to the sheet are visible. Under UV light: no inpainting is apparent.
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Kirk Varnedoe writes, "Jacqueline felt that all the swashbuckling 'musketeer' types that frequent Picasso's later work ultimately began in his fascination for the seventeenth-century world of The Night Watch, and John Richardson also has noted how often Picasso would add a swift little 'portrait' of a Rembrandt-like face to his signature when dedicating a book to a friend" (Picasso and Portraiture, New York, 1996, pp. 163 & 165). 

The present work can thus be seen as a type of self-portrait.  Picasso frames his renewed self-examination in terms of Rembrandt's own continued analysis of the self-portrait. The aging artist allows himself a re-birth in the swashbuckling figure of Rembrandt's musketeer. In choosing the iconography shared by this Old Master painter, Picasso was, at the end of his career, consciously aligning himself with one of the greatest artists of the Western canon.

These late portraits, such as Tête de mousquetaire, represent a psychological projection of a complex identity and illustrate the wide variety of influences and personas that made up the mental backdrop of this revolutionary artist.  As Simonetta Fraquelli commented, "In an era when non-figurative art was prevailing over figurative art and a linear progression of 'style' was considered more relevant than emotion and subject, it was customary for many younger artists and art critics to think of late Picasso as lesser Picasso.  However, the extensive re-evaluation of his late work since his death has highlighted its undiminished power and originality.  His capacity for emotional depth and painterly freedom in his late painting, together with his wide-ranging engagement with the imagery of the great painting of the past, was to have a lasting influence on the development of neo-expressionist art from the early 1980s onward ("Looking to the Past to Defy the Present: Picasso's Painting 1946-1973," in Picasso: Challenging the Past (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery, London, 2009, p. 146).

Fig. 1 Lucian Freud, Self-Portrait: Reflection, 2003-4, oil on canvas, Private Collection