Awash with the vibrant color and fluent gestures which characterize Picasso’s great late oeuvre, Têtes d'homme et de femme exists as a chimerical blend of two iconic series by the artist—the painter and model and the musketeer.

Pablo Picasso at Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, 1964. Photo © Edward Quinn, edwardquinn.com; likeness and artwork © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Executed on April 15, 1965, the present composition captures the exceptional zeal with which Picasso worked during this period. Since moving into his villa Notre-Dame de Vie in 1961, Picasso ensconced himself in a world of unfettered artistic activity. Aided by his wife Jacqueline’s doting and supportive presence, Picasso was free to fully immerse himself in his work like never before. The resultant canvases express the unbridled enthusiasm that Picasso found once again in his creative practice, with inspired compositions like Têtes d'homme et de femme.

In the present composition, Picasso’s crystalline blue-green hues and warm touches of pink, gold and orange draw the viewer into the scene. His signature inclusion of Ripolin is utilized to maximal effect, with the industrial paint’s fluid consistency lending an aqueous character to Picasso’s oils. The pairing of the differing types of paint results in a rich and topographical surface which is further enhanced by the dynamism of the brushwork. By balancing a detailed figure in patterned dress with the simplified visage at right, Picasso creates a natural rhythm to the work which leads the eye back to the central figure, a stand-in for the artist himself. The present work is characteristic of Picasso’s earlier dichotomous painter-model portraits, wherein the artist takes up the left half of the composition, while the model takes up the right half, often in lesser detail than the opposing, self-referential male figure (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Pablo Picasso, Le Peintre et son modèle, 1963, oil and Ripolin on canvas, sold: Replica Shoes 's, New York, 14 November 2016, lot 22 for $12,906,000 © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A few years earlier in 1963, the theme of the painter and his model had taken hold of Picasso’s psyche; here was a tradition of artistry into which he could paint himself. As Marie-Laure Bernadac writes of this period: “Picasso painted, drew and engraved [the subject of painter and model] so many t.mes s in the course of his life, from every possible angle, that it almost became a ‘genre’ in itself, like the landscape or the still-life. In 1963 and 1964, he barely painted anything else” (Marie-Laure Bernadac in Picasso. La Monographie 1881-1973, Barcelona, 2000, p. 439).

An amalgamation of self-portraiture and an homage to his favored painters like Rembrandt and Velazquez, such works equated Picasso with the canonical masters and thereby solidified his own artistic legacy (see fig. 2). This near-obsessive focus on the genre would gradually give rise to another triumphant figure borrowed from art and literary history: the musketeer. Recalling the valiant French soldiers of Alexandre Dumas and the protagonists of seventeenth-century Spanish masterpieces, Picasso’s musketeers would soon come to populate his canvases where the artist-and-model duos once did.

Fig. 2 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, King Philip IV of Spain, 1644, oil on canvas, The Frick collects ion, New York
“In December 1966, an army of seventeenth-century soldiers invaded Picasso’s pictorial world [see fig. 1]. These—soldiers of fortune, soldier-adventurers, Spaniards of the Golden Age—he referred to colloquially as ‘musketeers.’ The first contingent, mostly heads and busts, had austere faces, surrounded by long hair, ruffs and collars. Soon, however, Picasso was depicting his musketeers as full-length figures sporting swords, sabers, musket, or even the big lances with which cavalrymen of the 1600s were armed. At this point we see them clad in doublets, fancy hose, belts in vivid colors, embroidered with gold and silver, and hats adorned with multicolored plumes.”
- GERT SCHIFF, PICASSO: THE LAST YEARS, 1963-1973, NEW YORK 1983, P. 30

While the male figure’s detailed collar and coiffed hair allude to a seemingly lost golden age of painting, Picasso’s experimental use of mediums and daring formal arrangements catapults the present work to new era in line with the contemporary abstractions of Post-War painters. The liberated and gestural brushwork of Têtes d'homme et de femme conjures the works of New School artist like Willem de Kooning and Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler (see figs. 3 and 4).

Fig. 3 Willem de Kooning, Woman Standing—Pink, 1954-55, oil and charcoal on canvas, Anderson collects ion at Stanford University © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Fig. 4 Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob’s Ladder, 1957, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2022 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Once belonging to Picasso’s daughter Maya, the present work has been held in the same family collects ion for decades and comes to auction for the first t.mes in nearly forty years.