Pablo Picasso

Alex Maguy, Galerie de l'Elysée, Paris
Acquired from the above in 1968

Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Dessins 1966-1967, 1968, no. 30

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1967 et 1968, vol. XXVII, Paris, 1973, no. 49, illustrated pl. 14
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties II 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 67-272, illustrated p. 364

Executed on cream colored wove paper affixed to a mount at several places around the perimeter on verso. Edges are lightly deckled. Sheet is slightly time darkened overall. There are one or two tiny nicks around the extreme perimeter of the sheet. Medium is strong and the work is in overall very good condition.
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Pablo Picasso turned eighty-five years old in October 1966. In order to mark the extraordinary contribution that he had made to the trajectory of art history, a grand retrospective of his work was organized, Hommage à Pablo Picasso, held in the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais in Paris, thus crediting Picasso as one of the greatest masters of the century and a true living legend.

Executed at this extraordinary time, Trois têtes comprises three portraits of juxtaposed characters. The leftmost head articulates a man of unkempt appearance, with deep set eyes and shabby beard. The central head is denoted as a musketeer through his ruff and long hair. From 1966 onwards, the musketeer would serve as the artist’s most significant character, continuously appearing in Picasso’s works as a rakish and knowing lothario. The rightmost head presents a woman. While Picasso typically depicted specific women in the past—Marie-Therèse, Dora Maar and Olga count among the most prominently featured—during his later career, he tended to generalize his female figures, articulating rather an idea of women and a conflagration of his former partners. The multiplicity of the lines delineating the woman’s profile accentuates this tendency.

The rich assortment of characters in Trois têtes attests to the artist’s continued passion and inventiveness even as he approached his nineties. Following his important retrospective in 1966, Picasso increasingly, and not without self-aware humor, alluded in his compositions to the Italian and Dutch masters from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, associating himself with that glorified Golden Age of art. Through his thick and varied application of ink in the present work, Picasso suggests the chiaroscuro effect so successfully employed by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio. Picasso seemed to revel in his indefinable style and prodigious variety: “you see me here and yet I’ve already changed, I’m already elsewhere. I never stay in one place and that’s why I have no style” (quoted in André Verdet, Picasso(exhibition catalogue), Musée de l’Athénée, Geneva, 1963, n.p.).