Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Private Collection, Japan

Avignon, Palais des Papes, Picasso, oeuvres de 1969-1970, 1970, no. 76, illustrated in the catalogue

New York, Iolas Gallery

Basel, Galerie Beyeler

Raffael Alberti, A Year of Picasso, Paintings: 1969, New York, 1971,  illustrated in color pl. 208

Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso at 90, Lucerne, 1971, no. 307, illustrated p. 194

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1969, vol. 31, Paris, 1976, no. 418, illustrated pl. 120

The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture.  The Sixties III, 1968-1969, San Francisco, 2003, no. 69-423, illustrated p. 238

Excellent condition. Original canvas. Under ultra-violet light, there is no evidence of retouching. The paint surface is stable and in excellent, original condition.
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"I have less and less time and I have more and more to say," Picasso lamented in his final decade (quoted in K. Gallwitz, Picasso Laureatus, Lausanne & Paris, 1971, p. 166).  During these years, a major focus of his production was the monumental portraits of men in various costumes, collectively referred to as his Musketeer series.   These paintings, which are understood to be representations of Picasso's alter-ego, reveal the artist attempting to ward off death with a final burst of creativity.  Having gone through so many phases of stylistic and technical experimentation, Picasso now pared down his style in order to paint monumental works in quick, spontaneous brush-strokes. Rather than ponder the details of human anatomy and perspective, he isolated elements of his subject that fascinated and preoccupied him, and depicted them with a bold contemporary style and wit.   Furthermore, in recasting the iconography of old master painters such as Rembrandt and Velázquez, Picasso is, at the end of his career, consciously aligning himself with the greatest artists of the Western canon.

Marie-Laure Bernadac wrote about these monumental portraits of men in Picasso's late work: "Picasso paints a gallery of portraits of men who are seen 'in majesty,' writing or smoking. With their bearded, elongated faces, their huge questioning eyes, their long hair with or without a hat, these 'Heads' represent one last concession on the painter's part to the 'all-too-human'. By contract with the musketeers – who all have the same face – these are true portraits, strongly characterized and individual. One looks like a hippie, another like a prophet or perhaps an evangelist [...]. Picasso's confrontation with the human face, which makes him into the great portrait-painter of the twentieth century, brings him back to a confrontation with himself, the painter, young or old" (M.-L. Bernadac, 'Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model,' in Late Picasso (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, pp. 82-83).

As Simonetta Fraquelli has written, "In an era when non-figurative art 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 paintings of the past, was to have a lasting influence on the development of neo-expressionist art from the early 1980s onwards" (S. Fraquelli, 'Looking at the Past to Defy the Present: Picasso's Painting 1946-1973', in Picasso: Challenging the Past (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery, London, 2009, p. 146).

During the month that Homme au fanion was painted, Yvonne and Christian Zervos visited Picasso at his home in Mougins, in the South of France.  Fascinated by the energy and richness of his artistic output at the time, they decided to stage an exhibition of Picasso's recent work at the Palais des Papes in Avignon.  Yvonne died several months later, and Christian Zervos continued working on the exhibition in May 1970.  Homme au fanion was one of the exhibited canvases and certainly commanded a great presence in the majestic surroundings of the Avignon palace.

A year after the exhibition took place, Klaus Gallwitz already recognized the brilliance and inventiveness displayed by these pictures: "In the summer of 1970 the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was invaded by an assemblage such as it has never seen before, which took over the walls of the Gothic chapel, filling the vast warm space with its presence.  The new tenants were 165 paintings, hung in rows, two- or sometimes three-deep, like tiers of balconies.  Their figures were cupid with musketeers, musketeers with pipes, men sitting in chairs, reclining women, wreathed heads, painters with children, embracing couples, Pierrot and Harlequin, women in chairs and women with a bird, and finally a man with a golden helmet. [...]  The bewildering multiplicity of figures reveals an imagination of almost oriental richness.  The constantly changing pageant, the repetition or modification of types of painting or themes, is dictated by the ingenious yet apparently quite natural 'stage management' of chance, whose signature we recognize in fairytales.  Every episode and every character is given a symbolic value which reveals that Picasso is as much magician as poet" (K. Gallwitz, Picasso at 90: The Late Work, London, 1971, pp. 183 & 188).