Pablo Picasso

Dr. René-Albert Gutmann, Paris (acquired as a gift from the artist) 

Berggruen & Zevi Ltd., London

Estée Lauder, New York (acquired from the above in 1993 as a birthday gift for Leonard Lauder)

Acquired as a gift from the above in 1993

Executed over three days at the turn of 1970 to 1971, Pablo Picasso’s Trois personnages exemplifies the vitality and continued inventiveness that defined Picasso’s late oeuvre. With its bold interplay of pen and brush and the curiously disparate cast of characters, the present work highlights Picasso’s interest in both the formal techniques and narrative aspects of his Old Master forebears.

Picasso renders three figures in varying areas of light and dark, charging the present composition with dynamic tension. At right, an elaborately dressed man fixes his gaze on the nude woman opposite him and tenderly offers her a flower. Perhaps a Baroque nobleman or knight plucked from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, this figure is likely a stand-in for Picasso himself. This playful self-casting shows Picasso, ever self-assured, projecting himself as the noble and virile patrician figure.

At center, a bearded man, partially obscured in shadow, acts as the dramatic fulcrum of the chiaroscuro composition—his gaze inviting the viewer into this quasi-surreal dialogue, mediating the interaction between pursuer and pursued. His ambiguous presence evokes the specter of the artist-observer, a figure both within and outside the scene. His heavy beard and brooding demeanor echo Rembrandt’s self-portraits, suggesting Picasso’s identification with the lineage of great masters and their artistic inquiries into identity and authorship (see fig. 3).

Picasso’s simultaneously controlled and exuberant use of ink allows him to fully explore the contrast, texture and rhythm of each character. Swirling, decorative elements balance the stark nudity of the woman’s body. She is at once sensual and exaggerated with her voluptuous form and contorted posture. Her stylized visage and coiffure recall Picasso’s 1950s portraits of his wife Jacqueline (see fig. 2). As Marie-Laure Bernadac writes “It is characteristic of Picasso that he takes as his model—or as his Muse—the woman he loves and who loves with him, not a professional model. So what his [works] show is never a ‘model’ of a woman, but woman as model… Jacqueline never poses for him; but she is there always, everywhere. All the women of these years are Jacqueline, and yet they are rarely portraits. The image of the woman he loves is a model imprinted deep within him, and it emerges every time he paints a woman” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern (and traveling), Late Picasso. Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, London, 1988, p. 78).

The triadic configuration within Picasso’s Trois personnages—the heroic suitor, the exposed muse and the contemplative intermediary—mirrors the artist’s ongoing fascination with the interplay of desire, memory and artistic legacy. Though the 1970s marked the artist’s final years, Picasso’s late work reveals an undiminished urgency to revisit, reframe and reassert the core tensions and accomplishments of his career. His late oeuvre reveals a heightened affiliation with mythological and historical figures, from the powerful gods and virile musketeers that served as alter egos in his monumental paintings of the late 1960s, to the exquisitely rendered works on paper like Trois personnages, which pay homage to the great allegorical paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see figs. 1 and 4).

Executed with masterful economy and force, Trois personnages serves as a meditation on the dynamics between artist and model and as a commentary on Picasso’s lifelong engagement with history, love and self-reflection.