So often a story of Picasso’s life can be told through his models; the recognizable women who became the artist’s lovers, muses and wives continued to support and inspire the artist to greater, more profound innovation throughout his career. Perhaps no other figure looms larger in Picasso’s life and art than Jaqueline Roque, whom the artist.mes t in 1952.
A t.mes less rendition of Picasso’s last and arguably greatest muse, Buste de femme assise stands out within the series of paintings devoted to the artist’s raven-haired companion. Painted over several days in June of 1962, the canvas crystalizes Jacqueline’s image at the height of Picasso’s late career, immortalizing his wife in fluid, paint-laden brushstrokes.The present picture belongs to a series of depictions of Jacqueline in an armchair (see fig. 1). The motif of a seated woman in an armchair occurred repeatedly throughout Picasso’s oeuvre. While varying in style and depicting different women that marked each period of the artist’s life, these figures, seated and fully attentive, generally served as a vehicle for expressing the palpable sexual tension between the painter and his model. From soft, voluptuous curves of Marie-Thérèse Walter, to the fragmented, near-abstract nudes of his surrealist work and the exaggerated rendering of his later years, Picasso’s seated muses have a monumental, sculptural presence, and are invariably depicted with a powerful sense of psychological drama. It is perhaps no accident that the present work features prominently in the background of a portrait of the couple taken in 1962 (see fig. 2).
After encountering the twenty-five-year-old saleswoman at the pottery studio at Vallauris where he was working, Picasso fell instantly in love with Jacqueline and the two soon embarked upon an ardent and compassionate relationship that would last until the artist’s death. From 1954 onward, Jacqueline inhabited Picasso’s life, which is also to say, his work. The pair wed in 1961, a year prior to the creation of the present work, and settled into the Notre Dame de Vie estate in Mougins which would be their home and Picasso’s studio for the following decade. Friend and photographer David Douglas Duncan described the two as living “in a world of [Picasso’s] own creation, where he reigned almost as a king yet cherished only two treasures-freedom and the love of Jacqueline” (D. D. Duncan, Picasso and Jacqueline, New York, 1988, p. 9).
Right: Fig. 4 Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin, oil on canvas, 1910, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Though Jacqueline claimed never to have modeled for the artist, her doting omnipresence in Picasso’s world informed nearly every aspect of his creation during these years, her almond eyes, dark hair and aquiline nose proliferating within his paintings, sculptures, drawings and ceramics. Their love engrossed the artist and propelled him to new heights, experimenting with the figure of his muse in all manner of color and pose, though never obliterating or demonizing her visage in his work as he had done with past muses. As in the present work, Picasso often depicted Jacqueline in “double-profile,” a stylistic device invented in his portraits of Dora Maar, but the roots of which go back to his cubist experiments with multiple view-points see figs 3 & 4). While borrowing elements from his own artistic past, Picasso here created an image with a force and freedom he only achieved in the last decade of his career.
In his discussion of Picasso's late works, David Sylvester links Picasso’s imagery to his early masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, both distinguished by the "raw vitality" which they have as their central underlying theme [see fig. 5]: "The resemblance of figures in the Demoiselles and in late Picasso to masked tribal dancers is as crucial as their scale in giving them a threatening force. It is irrelevant whether or not particular faces or bodies are based on particular tribal models: what matters is the air these personages have of coming from a world more primitive, possibly more cannibalistic and certainly more elemental than ours. Despite the rich assortment of allusions to paintings in the Renaissance tradition, the treatment of space rejects that tradition in favour of an earlier one, the flat unperspectival space of, say, medieval Catalan frescoes... At twenty five, Picasso's raw vitality was already being enriched by the beginnings of an encyclopedic awareness of art; at ninety, his encyclopedic awareness of art was still being enlivened by a raw vitality" (D. Sylvester, Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 144).
Writer and friend of Picasso Hélène Parmelin stated: “All of Notre Dame de Vie is made up of Jacqueline, rests upon Jacqueline, signifies Jacqueline...Jacqueline has the gift of becoming painting to an unimaginable degree. She has within her that wonderful power on which the painter feeds. She flows. She is made for it and gives of herself and devotes herself and dies in harness though living all the while and never posing. She harbors that multiplicity of herself. She peoples Notre Dame de Vie with her hundred thousand possibilities. She unfurls ad infinitum. She invades everything. She becomes all characters. She takes the place of all models of all the artists on all the canvases. All the portraits resemble her, even though they may not resemble each other. All the heads are hers and there are a thousand different ones’ (H. Parmelin, Picasso: Intimate Secrets of a Studio at Notre Dame de Vie, New York, 1966, pp. 14-15).
