Pablo Picasso, Buste d'homme

As his biographer John Richardson explains, Pablo Picasso believed technique was important “on condition that one has so much… that it completely ceases to exist” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne and London, The Tate Gallery, Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, 1988, p. 42). Executed in 1969, Buste d’homme stands as test.mes nt to precisely that—to an artist for whom both the figure, and every formal gesture which described it had become instinctive. Despite the frequency with which he explored the present musketeer motif, now regarded as the most celebrated within the iconography which filled his prolific late body of work, the present work likewise testifies to the fact that his approach to the subject was far from formulaic. Rendered in a vibrant, primary palette and with a brushstroke that matches the figure’s machismo in its manner of resolution, the present schematic portrait is a remarkable example of the artist’s ingenious and unwavering ability to conceive of his beloved musketeer anew.

The musketeer first emerged as a protagonist within Picasso’s paintings in late 1965. While recovering from surgery, the artist began rereading his favorite literary classics—among which included Alexander Dumas’ canonical adventure novel The Three Musketeers. In keeping with his staunch pacifist politics, Picasso’s image of the romantic musketeer offered a poignant counterpart to contemporary news of the war in Vietnam and the Soviet advance in Eastern Europe. But beyond any intimation of socio-political commentary, the musketeers likewise served as poignant vehicles for advancing Picasso’s own personal mythology. Picasso invariably used his figurative subjects as means of both communicating and projecting the internal narrative he was grappling with at the t.mes of their making. In the early 1930s, he adopted the guise of the mythic sculptor-minotaur of antiquity, and later in the decade would transform his lover Dora Maar into his famed La Femme qui pleure, a self-reflective emblem of the turmoil brought about by World War II. From the outset, his personal life was made so inextricable from his painted realm that both came to exist with the same degree of reality in his perception.

In the twilight of his life, the now-immortal musketeer took on a particularly embodied significance within Picasso’s paintings. Spurred on by the unpredictability of death, Picasso began to produce with a fervor and in a quantity unparalleled within his oeuvre up until this point. In both style and substance, the musketeer served as an apt symbol for that impassioned practice. Cost.mes d, armed, and helmeted, the musketeer is invariably depicted as the lover, the painter, the soldier and, as in the present work, the nobleman. Feeling his own sexual powers deserting him, Picasso finds a particular source of rejuvenation in the amorous exploits of his musketeers, in whose representation themes of sex and passion abound (see fig. 1). Brought to life by the expression of his brush, the musketeer served as an almost sentient proxy for acting out all that the artist perceived he was losing hold of in his old age.

Compared to the gregarious chauvinism which otherwise characterizes the musketeer within this late body of work, the present Buste d’homme is uniquely stoic in its posture and for all of its expressive content, is austere in its composition. In terms of figurative elements, there is little in the way of excess—even the colors are decisive in their application. The face is distilled with a geometric angularity which is most pronounced in the two triangular articulations of the figure’s head, a pertinent reference to Picasso’s famed double-portrait technique. In the absence of the painterly abandon with which he otherwise worked at the t.mes , the artist’s revelry in the materiality of the painting is transferred into his choice of canvas. The present work is a radiant example of a series of similar compositions executed on corrugated cardboard, in which medium and support are made inextricable from the animated character of the work (see figs. 2-4).

This fascination with the musketeer and all of his ostentatious masculinity in many ways stems from its function as an embodiment of the glory of the Spanish Golden Age. Born in Malaga, a seaside town on the southern coast of Spain, Picasso’s Spanish heritage remained an enduring thematic undercurrent throughout his entire career. In what is believed to be the earliest known surviving work by the artist, executed in 1889 when he was only eight, Picasso painted a small oil of a matador astride his horse in a bullfighting arena. One of his earliest self portraits, Yo, Picasso, likewise brims with a distinctly Spanish character, and with some of the same flair and coloristic passion felt within Buste d’homme. When taken in the context of the present work, completed nearly 80 years later, this early focus on a distinctly Spanish subject comes to take on a remarkably prophetic quality. His childhood fascination with the matador as a character-type likewise gives color to the artist’s invigorated revival of the theme within his work in the late years of his life. As explained by Marie-Laure Bernadac: “In this series Picasso is returning to his first love; but the acrobats and saltimbanques of his youth… are succeeded at the end of his life by figures from a masquerade: Baroque heroes of the Age of Expansion, cavaliers and adventurers” (ibid., p. 82).

This revival of a Spanish character, communicated in the vibrant red and yellow palette of the present work, coincided with a heightened fascination with the work of the Old Masters, particularly that of his fellow Spaniard, Diego Velázquez. The influence of Velázquez on Picasso’s work traces further back within his oeuvre. Whereas his earlier reference was mimetic in its translation of the original into his own artistic dialect, however, as in his version of the canonized Las Meninas, this later period takes inspiration from what Velázquez represented as a figure himself, both in reality and within Picasso’s mythologizing reinvention of him (see figs. 6 and 7). Velázquez embodied all of the seventeenth century characteristics which Picasso saw in himself, and which he imbued in his painted musketeers. His representation of the character in the present work, with the starched ruff collar and brocade jacket, serves as a modern reinterpretation of the cost.mes s Velázquez painted three centuries earlier. The musketeer as he presently appears therefore stands as Picasso’s contribution to and continuation of that distinctly Spanish legacy.

To once again return to an observation by John Richardson, he explains of Picasso’s late output: “Every work he created was a part of himself, a particle of life, a point scored against death” (ibid., p. 85). The exploits and adventures of his painted musketeer undoubtedly offered an articulation of that sent.mes ntality. One lithograph in particular, Mousquetaire attablé avec un jeune garçon, évoquant sa vie, executed the year before the present work, exemplifies both in title and in subject the equally romantic and nostalgic character he attributed to the ubiquitous musketeer (see fig. 8). Pictured alongside the infamous lexicon of characters who at one point or other figured as protagonists within his oeuvre, Picasso depicts himself in the distinctive hat and cape, choosing the musketeer as his guise among all of the figurative achievements of his lifet.mes . And with the present Buste d’homme, Picasso solidifies that image of himself in posterity.