Pablo Picasso

Quintana Fine Art, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1986

Avignon, Palais des Papes, Pablo Picasso: 1969-1970, 1970, no. 4, illustrated in the catalogue (titled Personnage)

Rafael Alberti, Picasso en Avignon, Paris, 1971, no. 2, illustrated in colour pl. 2 (titled Personnage)
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1969, Paris, 1976, vol. 31, no. 24, illustrated pl. 10
Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, illustrated in a photograph p. 301
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties III 1968-1969, San Francisco, 2003, no. 69-023, illustrated p. 93

The board is stable, with four artist's pinholes in the corners and two at the centre edges of each side. There is a minor vertical crease to the upper right quadrant and some minor creases towards the left edge. There are some minor discolourations following the structure of the corrugated board and intrinsic to the support. Apart from two small spots of retouching to the right vertical hairline of the figure, some associated smaller specks of retouching, all visible under ultra-violet light, and a small spot of paint loss in the same area, this work is in good overall condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the blues are richer in the original.
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Picasso here portrays his male subject in the lineage of the Old Masters to whom he increasingly turned to in the 1960s and indeed until the end of his artistic career. He invigorates this portrait, inspired by his own visage, with the identity of the musketeer.  The image of the musketeer allowed Picasso to escape the limitations of contemporary subject matter and explore the spirit of a past age. These characters embodied the mannerisms of the Renaissance courtier and signified the golden age of painting. Picasso had devoted a large portion of his time and passion throughout the 1960s to the reinterpretation and investigation of the old masters, an experience in which he reaffirmed his connection to some of the greatest painters in the history of art. The musketeer series was a continuation of this interest and began, according to his wife Jacqueline Roque, 'when Picasso started to study Rembrandt' but his appreciation of other great painters of the Renaissance, including Peter Paul Rubens, also influenced the appearance of these characters (fig. 1).

Artist Jeff Koons has written on Picasso's mature paintings and their humanist ethos: 'There is a trust in the self that artists develop, enabling them to have transcendence into the realm of the objective, the desire to have not only self-acceptance, but the acceptance of others. Picasso's work ultimately connects to archetypes and represents the truly profound in humanity; it informs us of our past and the parameters of possibility of what it means to be human' (Jeff Koons, 'Picasso and the Objective,' in Picasso Mosqueteros (exhibition catalogue), Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009, p. 37). This archetypal nature permeates a work such as Buste d'homme.

The present work was shown in 1970 at the famous exhibition held at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. The show focused entirely on the output of 1969, a groundbreaking concept that showcased the infinite variety of Picasso's work.

Fig. 1, Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Birmingham, circa 1625, oil on panel, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence