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Lot Essay
Picasso painted this canvas on 13 April 1972. He completed only 12 more oil paintings after this one during the final year of his life: his last painting is dated 1 June 1972 (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 399). The artist created around 180 other pictures, all works on paper, including some large and wonderfully elaborate wash drawings, in this period; his last recorded work of all is a felt-tip drawing of a male nude dated 21 February 1973. Ingo F. Walther has stated that Picasso added white paint to heighten Nu couché et tête (dated 25 May 1972 (I); Zervos, vol. 33, no, 398; fig. 1) on the evening of 7 April 1973. This was his final effort in the studio; Picasso died shortly before midday, 8 April, in his home at Mougins, aged 91 and one-half years.
Homme assis et centaure, the present picture, is a vivid bacchanale of oil paint, and one should pause to savor the astonishingly rich colorism Picasso continued to practice at this late stage, when so many other concurrent works were done in black and white. John Richardson has noted that even Jacqueline found the above-cited Nu couché et tête difficult to decipher, a comment might also extend in some respects of the present Homme assis et centaure. There is clearly the large head of a bearded man at left, above a scaled-down figure of a horse at lower left, which looks rather like Picasso's son Claude's toy wooden horse as the artist had painted it in 1949 (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 145). A second ghostly figure looms behind the bearded man on the right side. The ambiguous configuration of man and horse, which may remind viewers of the more extreme positions in Marini's horses and riders, creates the illusion of a centaur, a hybrid creature out of antique mythology which possesses the head, arms, upper body, abdomen and genitalia of a man, which the ancient imagination grafted on to the four-legged body of a horse.
"Far from losing any of his cunning," Richardson has stated, "Picasso still had to make things as difficult as possible for himself and, by extension, for the viewer. True, in the past, dexterity, or rather his ingenious attempts to conceal dexterity, had on occasion got the better of him. Seldom, however, in the last paintings. The technique is very much there, above all the infinite variety of the formal invention and the wonderful plasticity of the paint, but it is never an end in itself. The point was to preserve the directness and spontaneity of his first rush of inspiration, to be free and loose and expressive as possible. In old age Picasso had finally discovered how to take liberty with space and form, colour and light, not to mention identity" (Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 42).
The mysterious presence of the centaur opens the door to a wide-ranging panoply of mythological possibilities one might apply to this painting, both in the traditional sense of original classical fable, and in such other instances how they relate to the work of Picasso himself. Centaurs probably reflect the memories of a pre-Hellenic horse cult, having risen from tales of savage men riding ordinary horses. As recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses and other sources, centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, the king of the Lapithae, and Nephele, a cloud which Jupiter had sent him in the tempting shape of Juno, his wife and sister, the chief goddess in the Roman pantheon. Alternately, they were the children of Centaurus, the son of Ixion, and the prized Magnesian mares of Thessaly. Centaurs were rough and brutish creatures, as wild as untamed horses; as suggested in their only partly human form they were largely uncivilized and prone to indulge their passionate nature and their enormous strength in heedless violence. The event known as the centauromachy is the most famous story in which they play a prominent part. Because of their kinship with Ixion, centaurs were invited to the wedding feast of the latter's son Pirithous and the girl Hippodamia. The beasts quickly became drunk and unruly--one of them, Eurytion, attempted to force himself on the bride. The hero Theseus, a friend and guest of Pirithous, killed the offender, setting off a bloody fracas between the men of the king's entourage and the centaurs (a scene which Michelangelo depicted in a carved relief on view in the Casa Buonnaroti, Florence), with the outcome that several more were slain and the rest driven off into the wild.
Picasso first featured a centaur in his work, taking the idea from another story in Ovid, in a series of drawings and two gouaches done in September 1920 in his classical style (Zervos, vol. 4, nos. 185 [fig. 2] and 187; vol. 6, nos. 1349 and 1402; and vol. 30, no. 104). After bearing Deianeira, the wife of Hercules, across the river Euonos, the centaur Nessus attempted to carry her off. Hercules shot an arrow dipped in the poison of the monster Hydra's blood into Nessus' breast. Before dying, Nessus persuaded Deianeira to preserve some of his blood, which he promised could be used to keep Hercules faithful to her. When Deianeira suspected that Hercules had taken up with Iole, whom the hero had once unsuccessfully claimed as his bride, Deianeira gave Hercules a shirt dipped in Nessus' blood. After Hercules put on the shirt, the poison burned into his skin, and in terrible agony he slowly died. Deianeira killed herself once she realized what she had done.
There are several scenes of rearing horses in the Vollard Suite of etchings, and a plate which depicts a sculptor and his female companion looking on as the marble sculpture of a centaur embracing a woman appears to come to life (Baer, no. 320). The minotaur--another hybrid creature Picasso pulled from antiquity, composed of a man's body with the head and tail of a bull--dominates these prints, as this strikingly potent image most effectively and famously came to embody for Picasso's imaginative purposes the primitively instinctual nature that he believed to be the driving force in male sexuality and other behavior.
Corollary equine subjects also feature in Picasso's work, such as in the 1906 gouaches of boys riding or leading horses (e.g., Zervos, vol. 1, no. 264; fig. 3). There are additionally, of course, his many depictions of picadors astride their mounts in the corrida scenes he painted and drew throughout his career. And as Picasso in the late works was deeply engaged in his theatre of memory, traveling back through time to scenes of his childhood and adolescence, one should not overlook his fascination in Barcelona during the mid-1890s with the young equestrienne star Rosita del Oro, whom John Richardson believes was the adolescent Picasso's first real love (see A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1, New York, 1991, pp. 67-68). Near the very end of his life, Picasso made old bearded Degas one of his favorite surrogates. Degas normally appeared in Picasso's late works as a voyeur peering through brothel keyholes into the mysteries of sex. Here Picasso may instead have been paying homage to Degas' considerable skills as a painter of horses and the races (Lemoisne, no. 262; fig. 4).
By merging the figure of the horse with the old man, who clearly stands in for the artist, Picasso is perhaps alluding the most admirably civilized of all centaurs, Chiron, who possessed few of the shortcomings of his kind; he was renowned for his wisdom in many things. Chiron was the son of the old god Saturn, who had transformed himself into a horse to seduce Philydra, the daughter of Oceanus. Chiron lived on Mount Pelion, in Thessaly (the ancestral haunt of centaurs), where he practiced for the good of all his extraordinary skills as a huntsman, musician, athlete, physician and seer. He served as tutor to the heroes Peleus, Achilles and Diomedes, and taught Aesculapius, the god of medicine. During a battle between centaurs and men, Chiron accidentally fell victim to another of Hercules' lethal poisoned arrows, but because he was of divine origin, he could not die. His wound would not heal, however, and the great pain proved to be unbearable. Chiron thus renounced his immortality, but as he was about to travel to the underworld, he was transformed into the constellation Centaurus. He is indeed the Centaur with whom Picasso at ninety might have in many ways identified himself.
Like Mr. Krugier's Picasso Buste d'homme écrivant (Autoportrait) (see lot 11), this Homme assis et centaure was also shown in Avignon II, the second comprehensive exhibition of the artist's late oil paintings, including his very last works of this kind, which opened posthumously at the Palais des Papes in May 1973. The painting Nu couché et tête mentioned at the head of this essay, the work which Picasso last touched before his death, was shown on an easel in a room of the Palais, just as Picasso might have last gazed upon it in his studio (see lot 11, fig. 7).
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Nu couché et tête, Mougins, 25 May 1972. Private collection. BARCODDE: 28856931
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, Paris, 1905-1906. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE: ART162193DHR
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Le Meneur de cheval, 1906. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE: 28856917
(fig. 4) Edgar Degas, Chevaux de courses (Devant les tribunes) 1866-1872. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. BARCODE: 28856900
Homme assis et centaure, the present picture, is a vivid bacchanale of oil paint, and one should pause to savor the astonishingly rich colorism Picasso continued to practice at this late stage, when so many other concurrent works were done in black and white. John Richardson has noted that even Jacqueline found the above-cited Nu couché et tête difficult to decipher, a comment might also extend in some respects of the present Homme assis et centaure. There is clearly the large head of a bearded man at left, above a scaled-down figure of a horse at lower left, which looks rather like Picasso's son Claude's toy wooden horse as the artist had painted it in 1949 (Zervos, vol. 15, no. 145). A second ghostly figure looms behind the bearded man on the right side. The ambiguous configuration of man and horse, which may remind viewers of the more extreme positions in Marini's horses and riders, creates the illusion of a centaur, a hybrid creature out of antique mythology which possesses the head, arms, upper body, abdomen and genitalia of a man, which the ancient imagination grafted on to the four-legged body of a horse.
"Far from losing any of his cunning," Richardson has stated, "Picasso still had to make things as difficult as possible for himself and, by extension, for the viewer. True, in the past, dexterity, or rather his ingenious attempts to conceal dexterity, had on occasion got the better of him. Seldom, however, in the last paintings. The technique is very much there, above all the infinite variety of the formal invention and the wonderful plasticity of the paint, but it is never an end in itself. The point was to preserve the directness and spontaneity of his first rush of inspiration, to be free and loose and expressive as possible. In old age Picasso had finally discovered how to take liberty with space and form, colour and light, not to mention identity" (Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 42).
The mysterious presence of the centaur opens the door to a wide-ranging panoply of mythological possibilities one might apply to this painting, both in the traditional sense of original classical fable, and in such other instances how they relate to the work of Picasso himself. Centaurs probably reflect the memories of a pre-Hellenic horse cult, having risen from tales of savage men riding ordinary horses. As recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses and other sources, centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, the king of the Lapithae, and Nephele, a cloud which Jupiter had sent him in the tempting shape of Juno, his wife and sister, the chief goddess in the Roman pantheon. Alternately, they were the children of Centaurus, the son of Ixion, and the prized Magnesian mares of Thessaly. Centaurs were rough and brutish creatures, as wild as untamed horses; as suggested in their only partly human form they were largely uncivilized and prone to indulge their passionate nature and their enormous strength in heedless violence. The event known as the centauromachy is the most famous story in which they play a prominent part. Because of their kinship with Ixion, centaurs were invited to the wedding feast of the latter's son Pirithous and the girl Hippodamia. The beasts quickly became drunk and unruly--one of them, Eurytion, attempted to force himself on the bride. The hero Theseus, a friend and guest of Pirithous, killed the offender, setting off a bloody fracas between the men of the king's entourage and the centaurs (a scene which Michelangelo depicted in a carved relief on view in the Casa Buonnaroti, Florence), with the outcome that several more were slain and the rest driven off into the wild.
Picasso first featured a centaur in his work, taking the idea from another story in Ovid, in a series of drawings and two gouaches done in September 1920 in his classical style (Zervos, vol. 4, nos. 185 [fig. 2] and 187; vol. 6, nos. 1349 and 1402; and vol. 30, no. 104). After bearing Deianeira, the wife of Hercules, across the river Euonos, the centaur Nessus attempted to carry her off. Hercules shot an arrow dipped in the poison of the monster Hydra's blood into Nessus' breast. Before dying, Nessus persuaded Deianeira to preserve some of his blood, which he promised could be used to keep Hercules faithful to her. When Deianeira suspected that Hercules had taken up with Iole, whom the hero had once unsuccessfully claimed as his bride, Deianeira gave Hercules a shirt dipped in Nessus' blood. After Hercules put on the shirt, the poison burned into his skin, and in terrible agony he slowly died. Deianeira killed herself once she realized what she had done.
There are several scenes of rearing horses in the Vollard Suite of etchings, and a plate which depicts a sculptor and his female companion looking on as the marble sculpture of a centaur embracing a woman appears to come to life (Baer, no. 320). The minotaur--another hybrid creature Picasso pulled from antiquity, composed of a man's body with the head and tail of a bull--dominates these prints, as this strikingly potent image most effectively and famously came to embody for Picasso's imaginative purposes the primitively instinctual nature that he believed to be the driving force in male sexuality and other behavior.
Corollary equine subjects also feature in Picasso's work, such as in the 1906 gouaches of boys riding or leading horses (e.g., Zervos, vol. 1, no. 264; fig. 3). There are additionally, of course, his many depictions of picadors astride their mounts in the corrida scenes he painted and drew throughout his career. And as Picasso in the late works was deeply engaged in his theatre of memory, traveling back through time to scenes of his childhood and adolescence, one should not overlook his fascination in Barcelona during the mid-1890s with the young equestrienne star Rosita del Oro, whom John Richardson believes was the adolescent Picasso's first real love (see A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1, New York, 1991, pp. 67-68). Near the very end of his life, Picasso made old bearded Degas one of his favorite surrogates. Degas normally appeared in Picasso's late works as a voyeur peering through brothel keyholes into the mysteries of sex. Here Picasso may instead have been paying homage to Degas' considerable skills as a painter of horses and the races (Lemoisne, no. 262; fig. 4).
By merging the figure of the horse with the old man, who clearly stands in for the artist, Picasso is perhaps alluding the most admirably civilized of all centaurs, Chiron, who possessed few of the shortcomings of his kind; he was renowned for his wisdom in many things. Chiron was the son of the old god Saturn, who had transformed himself into a horse to seduce Philydra, the daughter of Oceanus. Chiron lived on Mount Pelion, in Thessaly (the ancestral haunt of centaurs), where he practiced for the good of all his extraordinary skills as a huntsman, musician, athlete, physician and seer. He served as tutor to the heroes Peleus, Achilles and Diomedes, and taught Aesculapius, the god of medicine. During a battle between centaurs and men, Chiron accidentally fell victim to another of Hercules' lethal poisoned arrows, but because he was of divine origin, he could not die. His wound would not heal, however, and the great pain proved to be unbearable. Chiron thus renounced his immortality, but as he was about to travel to the underworld, he was transformed into the constellation Centaurus. He is indeed the Centaur with whom Picasso at ninety might have in many ways identified himself.
Like Mr. Krugier's Picasso Buste d'homme écrivant (Autoportrait) (see lot 11), this Homme assis et centaure was also shown in Avignon II, the second comprehensive exhibition of the artist's late oil paintings, including his very last works of this kind, which opened posthumously at the Palais des Papes in May 1973. The painting Nu couché et tête mentioned at the head of this essay, the work which Picasso last touched before his death, was shown on an easel in a room of the Palais, just as Picasso might have last gazed upon it in his studio (see lot 11, fig. 7).
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Nu couché et tête, Mougins, 25 May 1972. Private collection. BARCODDE: 28856931
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, Paris, 1905-1906. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE: ART162193DHR
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Le Meneur de cheval, 1906. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE: 28856917
(fig. 4) Edgar Degas, Chevaux de courses (Devant les tribunes) 1866-1872. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. BARCODE: 28856900