Lot Essay
Picasso created Tête d'homme in 1912 at the very pinnacle of Cubism, which he had pioneered with fellow artist Georges Braque. It is a testimony to the quality and importance of this drawing, which appears to have formed part of the preliminary process of exploration that lead to Picasso's celebrated painting of the L'aficionado, that it has such an extensive exhibition history and featured in several important shows during the artist's lifetime.
In his Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso's works, Christian Zervos had dated Tête d'homme to Picasso's time in Paris during 1912; Palau i Fabre likewise ascribed it to the Autumn in Paris of that year. However, it appears from its links to L'aficionado and also another painting, Le poète, both of which were photographed alongside other works outside the house in Sorgues that Picasso rented in the South of France during that Summer, that it was drawn during this period, a link emphasised by its being placed near to both those works in William Rubin's catalogue for the important 1989 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. There, he convincingly dated Tête d'homme to Picasso's time in Sorgues.
The Summer of 1912 was a turbulent time for Picasso, and this had ramifications in the continuing development of Cubism. It has often been stated that Picasso's stylistic changes were linked to the women in his life, and so too that the way in which the analytical Cubism he had formerly espoused gave way to the clearer, breezier and more playful "synthetic Cubism" nascently evident in Tête d'homme may have reflected the end of his relationship with Fernande Olivier, his first great Cubist Muse, and the beginning of that with "Eva," or Marcelle Humbert. During that Summer, Picasso had headed with Eva to the South of France for his holidays, intending to stay in Céret, yet when he had heard that Fernande was following him thither he fled, eventually settling in the Villa des Clochettes in Sorgues, just north of Avignon. Rather than the beauty and luxury he may have formerly anticipated in the South, he now found himself in a house which John Richardson recounts leaked so badly that Picasso and Eva slept under an umbrella when it rained.
The canvas that would eventually become L'aficionado, to which Tête d'homme appears linked, had originally been conceived as a picture of a bagpiper in Céret. This transformation was in part due to Picasso's movements from place to place during that Summer. The disruptions had led to changes of style and subject over those months. A crucial factor in the thematic evolution of L'aficionado was his proximity to the arenas of Nîmes and Arles. When he settled in Sorgues, the Spanish artist was delighted to find that the corrida was taking place nearby. In one of his letters to Kahnweiler, he recounted: "I was in Nîmes and saw the bullfight. It's so rare to find an art that is intelligent about itself. Only Mazantinito did anything of note, but in spite of it all the fight was pleasant and the day beautiful. I love Nîmes" (Picasso, quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., New York, 1989, p. 399). Half a century later, Picasso would still attend the bullfights in the same arena.
The day after writing to Kahnweiler, in one of his frequent letters entreating Braque, his fellow explorer in the Cubist adventure, to join him in Sorgues, he explained that he had, "transformed an already begun painting of a man into an aficionado; I think he would look good with his banderilla in hand, and I am trying to give him a real southern face" (Picasso, quoted in ibid., p. 399). It appears to be towards achieving this result that Picasso drew Tête d'homme. The moustache, a playful form recalling musical notations, appears to be part of that "real southern face," an effect that he may have intended to heighten through the use of the shading of the main facial area. In two subsequent works on paper, this is accentuated in different ways: in Tête (Z VI 1144), the shading is more extreme, with the moustache filled in, giving a sense of swarthiness, while in the Tête d'homme now in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, there is a single panel of pink, a flesh tone hinting at Picasso's desire to reintroduce both people and color into his work.
The planar construction of Tête d'homme may be linked to the increasing interest in collage that occupied both Braque and Picasso during 1912 and would become so intrinsic to their later Cubist works, and this association is emphasized by the single colored plane in the Winterthur picture. This was one of the final periods of close collaboration between Braque and Picasso, before they drifted off in separate directions, an effect not helped by the fact that Marcelle, Braque's wife, had been a friend of Fernande and was not close to Eva. During this time, the pair still saw each other's works as much as possible; they considered themselves the great trailblazers. Indeed, Braque was even nicknamed "Wilbourg," after the aviator Wilbur Wright. Picasso and Braque saw themselves as the Wright Brothers, bringing about daring innovations within the field of picture-making. The Wright Brothers analogy may also have been a reference to the planar construction of their Cubist images: in Tête d'homme, the almost geometric construction faintly invokes the construction of the wings of the biplanes of the time, demonstrating the extent to which Picasso was succeeding in representing the figurative world around him, the human realm that so endlessly fascinated him, through incredibly daring, modern means suited to the new and exciting technological age.
In his Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso's works, Christian Zervos had dated Tête d'homme to Picasso's time in Paris during 1912; Palau i Fabre likewise ascribed it to the Autumn in Paris of that year. However, it appears from its links to L'aficionado and also another painting, Le poète, both of which were photographed alongside other works outside the house in Sorgues that Picasso rented in the South of France during that Summer, that it was drawn during this period, a link emphasised by its being placed near to both those works in William Rubin's catalogue for the important 1989 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. There, he convincingly dated Tête d'homme to Picasso's time in Sorgues.
The Summer of 1912 was a turbulent time for Picasso, and this had ramifications in the continuing development of Cubism. It has often been stated that Picasso's stylistic changes were linked to the women in his life, and so too that the way in which the analytical Cubism he had formerly espoused gave way to the clearer, breezier and more playful "synthetic Cubism" nascently evident in Tête d'homme may have reflected the end of his relationship with Fernande Olivier, his first great Cubist Muse, and the beginning of that with "Eva," or Marcelle Humbert. During that Summer, Picasso had headed with Eva to the South of France for his holidays, intending to stay in Céret, yet when he had heard that Fernande was following him thither he fled, eventually settling in the Villa des Clochettes in Sorgues, just north of Avignon. Rather than the beauty and luxury he may have formerly anticipated in the South, he now found himself in a house which John Richardson recounts leaked so badly that Picasso and Eva slept under an umbrella when it rained.
The canvas that would eventually become L'aficionado, to which Tête d'homme appears linked, had originally been conceived as a picture of a bagpiper in Céret. This transformation was in part due to Picasso's movements from place to place during that Summer. The disruptions had led to changes of style and subject over those months. A crucial factor in the thematic evolution of L'aficionado was his proximity to the arenas of Nîmes and Arles. When he settled in Sorgues, the Spanish artist was delighted to find that the corrida was taking place nearby. In one of his letters to Kahnweiler, he recounted: "I was in Nîmes and saw the bullfight. It's so rare to find an art that is intelligent about itself. Only Mazantinito did anything of note, but in spite of it all the fight was pleasant and the day beautiful. I love Nîmes" (Picasso, quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., New York, 1989, p. 399). Half a century later, Picasso would still attend the bullfights in the same arena.
The day after writing to Kahnweiler, in one of his frequent letters entreating Braque, his fellow explorer in the Cubist adventure, to join him in Sorgues, he explained that he had, "transformed an already begun painting of a man into an aficionado; I think he would look good with his banderilla in hand, and I am trying to give him a real southern face" (Picasso, quoted in ibid., p. 399). It appears to be towards achieving this result that Picasso drew Tête d'homme. The moustache, a playful form recalling musical notations, appears to be part of that "real southern face," an effect that he may have intended to heighten through the use of the shading of the main facial area. In two subsequent works on paper, this is accentuated in different ways: in Tête (Z VI 1144), the shading is more extreme, with the moustache filled in, giving a sense of swarthiness, while in the Tête d'homme now in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, there is a single panel of pink, a flesh tone hinting at Picasso's desire to reintroduce both people and color into his work.
The planar construction of Tête d'homme may be linked to the increasing interest in collage that occupied both Braque and Picasso during 1912 and would become so intrinsic to their later Cubist works, and this association is emphasized by the single colored plane in the Winterthur picture. This was one of the final periods of close collaboration between Braque and Picasso, before they drifted off in separate directions, an effect not helped by the fact that Marcelle, Braque's wife, had been a friend of Fernande and was not close to Eva. During this time, the pair still saw each other's works as much as possible; they considered themselves the great trailblazers. Indeed, Braque was even nicknamed "Wilbourg," after the aviator Wilbur Wright. Picasso and Braque saw themselves as the Wright Brothers, bringing about daring innovations within the field of picture-making. The Wright Brothers analogy may also have been a reference to the planar construction of their Cubist images: in Tête d'homme, the almost geometric construction faintly invokes the construction of the wings of the biplanes of the time, demonstrating the extent to which Picasso was succeeding in representing the figurative world around him, the human realm that so endlessly fascinated him, through incredibly daring, modern means suited to the new and exciting technological age.