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Lot Essay
Tête d'homme et nu assis was painted at Mougins on 25 November 1964 and explores one of the themes that was central to Picasso's output: the artist in his studio. Here, the artist is represented by the bearded head shown, with calligraphic simplicity, to the left of the canvas, while the model is a naked woman sitting in a pose reminiscent of Picasso's reincarnation of the Femmes d'Algers by Delacroix. The viewer is plunged into the artist's studio and equally the artist's concerns, his thoughts on the process of creation.
Picasso was a fearless, restless innovator, and these qualities came to a peak in 1964, when he was already the grand statesman of modern art, advanced in years, yet still displaying his incredible youthful vigour on canvas. Nowhere was this more clear than in his serial investigation of the theme of the artist and his model, a subject which he had already explored in the early years of the twentieth century and which would serve as a touchstone for the rest of his career. Late in 1964, when this subject came to the fore once more in pictures such as Tête d'homme et nu assis, Picasso created a series of pictures that culminated in November in several in which, as here, the head of the artist was reduced to sparse annotations while the woman was more objectively displayed. This introduced a dichotomy between figuration and abstraction that was all the more current when one considers the advances being made in Europe in the Informel scene and in the United States with the Action Painters. In a review of an exhibition of Picasso's works held earlier in the same year, John Ashbery alluded to this development in the New York Herald Tribune, writing:
'It's hard to believe that Picasso follows the current art scene very closely, yet there are passages in this work that are like distant reverberations of recent avant-garde developments... one can see traces of Action Painting and other far-out movements in the new Picasso... Most of the paintings show a new preoccupation with texture for its own sake' (J. Ashbery, quoted in W. Spies, ed., Picasso: Painting against Time, exh. cat., Vienna & Dusseldorf, 2006, p. 275).
During the course of 1964, Picasso defied his age and the expectations of others by creating his pictures with a seemingly untiring energy. Indeed, the superstitious artist appears to have been defiantly warding off the concept of age. His impressive output necessitated an entire volume of Christian Zervos' catalogue raisonné being devoted to that single year. That energy is clear in the zig-zagging lines and the texture with which Tête d'homme et nu assis has been rendered. Picasso has managed to balance the slow gestation of his prolonged investigation of the theme of the artist and his model - and indeed of this particular compositional grouping - with the zesty rapidity of execution which allows each brushstroke to come to the fore, thrust into relief by the contrast with the background, speaking of the artist's incredible dynamism.
Picasso was a fearless, restless innovator, and these qualities came to a peak in 1964, when he was already the grand statesman of modern art, advanced in years, yet still displaying his incredible youthful vigour on canvas. Nowhere was this more clear than in his serial investigation of the theme of the artist and his model, a subject which he had already explored in the early years of the twentieth century and which would serve as a touchstone for the rest of his career. Late in 1964, when this subject came to the fore once more in pictures such as Tête d'homme et nu assis, Picasso created a series of pictures that culminated in November in several in which, as here, the head of the artist was reduced to sparse annotations while the woman was more objectively displayed. This introduced a dichotomy between figuration and abstraction that was all the more current when one considers the advances being made in Europe in the Informel scene and in the United States with the Action Painters. In a review of an exhibition of Picasso's works held earlier in the same year, John Ashbery alluded to this development in the New York Herald Tribune, writing:
'It's hard to believe that Picasso follows the current art scene very closely, yet there are passages in this work that are like distant reverberations of recent avant-garde developments... one can see traces of Action Painting and other far-out movements in the new Picasso... Most of the paintings show a new preoccupation with texture for its own sake' (J. Ashbery, quoted in W. Spies, ed., Picasso: Painting against Time, exh. cat., Vienna & Dusseldorf, 2006, p. 275).
During the course of 1964, Picasso defied his age and the expectations of others by creating his pictures with a seemingly untiring energy. Indeed, the superstitious artist appears to have been defiantly warding off the concept of age. His impressive output necessitated an entire volume of Christian Zervos' catalogue raisonné being devoted to that single year. That energy is clear in the zig-zagging lines and the texture with which Tête d'homme et nu assis has been rendered. Picasso has managed to balance the slow gestation of his prolonged investigation of the theme of the artist and his model - and indeed of this particular compositional grouping - with the zesty rapidity of execution which allows each brushstroke to come to the fore, thrust into relief by the contrast with the background, speaking of the artist's incredible dynamism.