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Lot Essay
Picasso inscribed and dated the reverse of this canvas “Mardi Gras 15.2.72 II”–he painted it on “Fat Tuesday,” the last day before the beginning of Lent. The artist wasn’t going out to celebrate this wildly Bacchic festival, a relic of the Roman Saturnalia and Lupercalia from pre-Christian antiquity. Such a foray, if at age 90 Picasso were up to it, was patently unsafe; the world’s most famous living artist would have been mobbed if he showed his face. Mardi Gras was for the painter mainly just another day for work in the studio. And there Mardi Gras was no more a celebratory occasion than any other for outlandishly dressing up his subjects; he had been doing this time after time since he embarked on the mousquetaire series in early 1967. It may have been, however, a propitious moment to take a closer look at himself.
His getup here is that of an elderly cavalier, a veteran of hard-fought battles and palace intrigues, as if he had stepped out of a 17th century Spanish portrait, and after riding a fast-forward time machine, dropped into the post-war era of visceral, no-holds-barred painting. The personal features of the artist are nonetheless still recognizable in these frenetic slatherings and washes of oil paint. The eyes bulging from their sockets are a tongue-in-cheek display of Picasso’s own vaunted mirada fuerte–his “strong gaze.” His thick, squat nose with broad nostrils is also apparent. We notice the wizened stubble of several days’ growth–painting as constantly as he did, shaving was a nuisance–but the artist has indulged himself in fancying far more hair on this pate than was actually left at his age. Most telling is the heraldic display of two chevrons in blue on white, alluding to the stripes of the Mediterranean fisherman’s vest Picasso liked to wear in the studio and around the house. This courtly Spanish gent, seated in Siglo de Oro costume, is as close to a self-referential pictorial surrogate–while not in any sense a conventional self-portrait–as one might find among the heads and busts of the many mousquetaire types that populated Picasso’s canvases during the final years of his career.
Picasso painted two other canvases during Mardi Gras 1972. The first he completed that day is a visage that appears to dissolve into a burst of fireworks, seen between the red drapes of a window, a painting he simply titled Mardi Gras (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 316). He painted the present aristocratically purplish-toned Homme assis next, and then the third picture, likewise titled, in which the seated man is rustically attired under the broad, floppy brim of a gardener’s straw hat (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 318).
Most suitably for Mardi Gras, the present Homme assis is a raucous Bacchanalia of oil paint, and one should pause to savor the wondrously varied means by which Picasso breathlessly applied his paints, as if he were spontaneously reinventing and improvising from moment to moment, from one picture to the next, the technique of laying paint on canvas as he worked. “As soon as Picasso finds a solution, he contests it,” Pierre Daix declared in 1971. “Painting never comes to an end” (quoted in W. Spies, ed., Picasso: Painting Against Time, exh. cat., Albertina, Vienna, 2006, p. 293).
“Far from losing any of his cunning,” John Richardson has written, “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 as 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., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 42).
This Homme assis appeared in Avignon II, the second of two exhibitions held in the august Palais des Papes, events organized in conjunction with the annual Festival d’Avignon that were to reveal to the public and critics alike exactly what Picasso had been up to in the seclusion of his Mougins studio. It did not escape notice that the two exhibitions in the Palais des Papes had in fact celebrated Picasso's "return" to Avignon, the town that figured in the title of his famous cubist painting, created in 1907, and where he had painted during the months just prior to the beginning of the First World War, while his friends Braque and Derain were working nearby.
Picasso was approaching his 89th birthday, he could still boast of fine health, and indeed he was painting non-stop when the first Avignon exhibition took place in May-October 1970. It comprised 167 oils and 45 drawings that he had done between the beginning of January 1969 and the end of January 1970. Preparations for a second exhibition, intended to showcase paintings only that had been done since the previous showing, between February 1970 and the end of 1972, were well underway when Picasso died on 8 April 1973. It was fortunate that Picasso had already selected the works he wanted to show, 201 in all; in this respect, the exhibition was not an entirely “posthumous” affair, and the life-affirming nature of the pictures dispelled any sense of commemorative gloom. Avignon II opened in May 1973 and ran into late September.
The Avigon exhibitions were popular with visitors, especially young people, who attended in droves. “The Avignon Picasso was more outrageous than ever,” Marie-Noëlle Delorme stated. “With death imminent, he gave the expression of exploding, giving totally free rein to his hand and his fantasies” (in W. Spies, ed., exh. cat., op. cit., 2006, p. 265). The critics, however, were generally less than impressed, ambivalent at best, and often downright hostile and dismissive. “It’s open warfare between Picasso and the art establishment,” declared Le Figaro (24 December 1971; quoted in ibid., p. 266).
“The astonishment of the critics,” Pierre Daix wrote, “was almost an unbearable reminder that Picasso was still a living force. He had once again made a violent escape from everything which had been expected of him, from everything which people had come to consider his art” (Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 371). Jean-Paul Crespelle believed that in comparison to the pictures in Avignon I, the canvases of 1970-1972 “reveal a deeper exploration of painting: an exploration of the harmonies of color that were never Picasso’s great strength, the quest for an appealing materiality... One day we will have to return to the traditional concept of painting after so much non-art. And on that day, Picasso may once again become the leading figure he was between 1907 and 1917” (Review in Paris Soir, 26 May 1973; quoted in ibid., p. 298).
Among the army of mousquetaires on parade at Avignon I, one could easily discern the many sources from which these characters sprang in early 1967: Rembrandt primarily, but also Rubens and Hals from the Dutch School of the early Baroque, and Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo and other painters of the Spanish Siglo del Oro. Among the portraits showcased in Avignon II another master–this one from the not so distant past and one who was alive and painting when Picasso was a child–made his presence most strongly felt: Vincent van Gogh. “Of all the artists with whom Picasso identified,” Richardson has written, “Van Gogh is the least often cited but probably the one who meant most to him in later years. He talked of him as his patron saint, talked of him with intense admiration and compassion, never with any of his habitual irony or mockery... At first glance Van Gogh does not manifest himself very overtly in Picasso’s work, certainly not as overtly as Manet or Velázquez. But that is largely because his influence is not a superficial stylistic question of borrowed compositions or anecdotal trappings, but a matter of deep spiritual identification” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1988, p. 32).
Throughout his career, Picasso had remained loyal to the subject in painting, which for him chiefly meant the figure. Apart from a few still-lifes, the paintings shown in Avignon I and II each show the figure, created at a time when this subject was out-of-style, and even considered passé. The new freedoms in painting technique that post-war American painting had brought to the international scene may have had some impact on Picasso, as Miró acknowledged it had on himself, but Picasso had never at any time in his long career embraced abstraction–he abjured the very idea of it. And as if to make that point, and to broadcast it to the art world from the halls of the Palais des Papes, Picasso positively reveled in his love of the figure in the mousquetaires and other late paintings.
Picasso had summoned the name of Van Gogh in this cause as far back as 1935, when he and Christian Zervos were discussing the growing interest in abstraction at that time. “Abstract art is only painting,” Picasso declared. “What about drama?... It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is... What forces our interest is Cézanne’s anxiety–that's Cézanne’s lesson; the torments of Van Gogh–that is, that actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham” (quoted in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, pp. 9 and 11).
Picasso completed fewer than twenty canvases after painting the present Homme assis; the last work in oils is dated 1 June 1972 (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 399). The artist created around 180 other pictures during this period, all works on paper, including some large and wonderfully elaborate wash drawings. His final known opus is a felt-tip drawing of a male nude executed on 21 February 1973. But a painter he remained to the very end. According to Ingo F. Walther, on the evening of 7 April 1973, Picasso retouched with white paint the canvas Nu couché et tête, dated 25 May 1972 (I) (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 398). Picasso died shortly before midday 8 April in his home at Mougins, at the age of 91 and one-half years.
[A] Picasso with Le couple, painted 9 October 1970, in Mougins, on the artist’s 89th birthday, 25 October 1970.
NYPARHT
[B] Pablo Picasso, Mardi Gras, Mougins 2 February 1972 (I). Private collection.
[C] Pablo Picasso, Homme assis, Mougins, 2 February 1972 (III). Private collection.
Pablo Picasso, Personnage à la pelle, July-November 1971. Private Collection.
Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624. The Wallace Collection, London
Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez, 1953. Private Collection.
Installation photograph, Pablo Picasso, 1970-1972, Avignon, 1973. Photograph by Mario Atzinger. Homme Assis, the present lot, is located on the lower tier, third painting from the left
NYPRARIQ
His getup here is that of an elderly cavalier, a veteran of hard-fought battles and palace intrigues, as if he had stepped out of a 17th century Spanish portrait, and after riding a fast-forward time machine, dropped into the post-war era of visceral, no-holds-barred painting. The personal features of the artist are nonetheless still recognizable in these frenetic slatherings and washes of oil paint. The eyes bulging from their sockets are a tongue-in-cheek display of Picasso’s own vaunted mirada fuerte–his “strong gaze.” His thick, squat nose with broad nostrils is also apparent. We notice the wizened stubble of several days’ growth–painting as constantly as he did, shaving was a nuisance–but the artist has indulged himself in fancying far more hair on this pate than was actually left at his age. Most telling is the heraldic display of two chevrons in blue on white, alluding to the stripes of the Mediterranean fisherman’s vest Picasso liked to wear in the studio and around the house. This courtly Spanish gent, seated in Siglo de Oro costume, is as close to a self-referential pictorial surrogate–while not in any sense a conventional self-portrait–as one might find among the heads and busts of the many mousquetaire types that populated Picasso’s canvases during the final years of his career.
Picasso painted two other canvases during Mardi Gras 1972. The first he completed that day is a visage that appears to dissolve into a burst of fireworks, seen between the red drapes of a window, a painting he simply titled Mardi Gras (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 316). He painted the present aristocratically purplish-toned Homme assis next, and then the third picture, likewise titled, in which the seated man is rustically attired under the broad, floppy brim of a gardener’s straw hat (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 318).
Most suitably for Mardi Gras, the present Homme assis is a raucous Bacchanalia of oil paint, and one should pause to savor the wondrously varied means by which Picasso breathlessly applied his paints, as if he were spontaneously reinventing and improvising from moment to moment, from one picture to the next, the technique of laying paint on canvas as he worked. “As soon as Picasso finds a solution, he contests it,” Pierre Daix declared in 1971. “Painting never comes to an end” (quoted in W. Spies, ed., Picasso: Painting Against Time, exh. cat., Albertina, Vienna, 2006, p. 293).
“Far from losing any of his cunning,” John Richardson has written, “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 as 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., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 42).
This Homme assis appeared in Avignon II, the second of two exhibitions held in the august Palais des Papes, events organized in conjunction with the annual Festival d’Avignon that were to reveal to the public and critics alike exactly what Picasso had been up to in the seclusion of his Mougins studio. It did not escape notice that the two exhibitions in the Palais des Papes had in fact celebrated Picasso's "return" to Avignon, the town that figured in the title of his famous cubist painting, created in 1907, and where he had painted during the months just prior to the beginning of the First World War, while his friends Braque and Derain were working nearby.
Picasso was approaching his 89th birthday, he could still boast of fine health, and indeed he was painting non-stop when the first Avignon exhibition took place in May-October 1970. It comprised 167 oils and 45 drawings that he had done between the beginning of January 1969 and the end of January 1970. Preparations for a second exhibition, intended to showcase paintings only that had been done since the previous showing, between February 1970 and the end of 1972, were well underway when Picasso died on 8 April 1973. It was fortunate that Picasso had already selected the works he wanted to show, 201 in all; in this respect, the exhibition was not an entirely “posthumous” affair, and the life-affirming nature of the pictures dispelled any sense of commemorative gloom. Avignon II opened in May 1973 and ran into late September.
The Avigon exhibitions were popular with visitors, especially young people, who attended in droves. “The Avignon Picasso was more outrageous than ever,” Marie-Noëlle Delorme stated. “With death imminent, he gave the expression of exploding, giving totally free rein to his hand and his fantasies” (in W. Spies, ed., exh. cat., op. cit., 2006, p. 265). The critics, however, were generally less than impressed, ambivalent at best, and often downright hostile and dismissive. “It’s open warfare between Picasso and the art establishment,” declared Le Figaro (24 December 1971; quoted in ibid., p. 266).
“The astonishment of the critics,” Pierre Daix wrote, “was almost an unbearable reminder that Picasso was still a living force. He had once again made a violent escape from everything which had been expected of him, from everything which people had come to consider his art” (Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 371). Jean-Paul Crespelle believed that in comparison to the pictures in Avignon I, the canvases of 1970-1972 “reveal a deeper exploration of painting: an exploration of the harmonies of color that were never Picasso’s great strength, the quest for an appealing materiality... One day we will have to return to the traditional concept of painting after so much non-art. And on that day, Picasso may once again become the leading figure he was between 1907 and 1917” (Review in Paris Soir, 26 May 1973; quoted in ibid., p. 298).
Among the army of mousquetaires on parade at Avignon I, one could easily discern the many sources from which these characters sprang in early 1967: Rembrandt primarily, but also Rubens and Hals from the Dutch School of the early Baroque, and Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo and other painters of the Spanish Siglo del Oro. Among the portraits showcased in Avignon II another master–this one from the not so distant past and one who was alive and painting when Picasso was a child–made his presence most strongly felt: Vincent van Gogh. “Of all the artists with whom Picasso identified,” Richardson has written, “Van Gogh is the least often cited but probably the one who meant most to him in later years. He talked of him as his patron saint, talked of him with intense admiration and compassion, never with any of his habitual irony or mockery... At first glance Van Gogh does not manifest himself very overtly in Picasso’s work, certainly not as overtly as Manet or Velázquez. But that is largely because his influence is not a superficial stylistic question of borrowed compositions or anecdotal trappings, but a matter of deep spiritual identification” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1988, p. 32).
Throughout his career, Picasso had remained loyal to the subject in painting, which for him chiefly meant the figure. Apart from a few still-lifes, the paintings shown in Avignon I and II each show the figure, created at a time when this subject was out-of-style, and even considered passé. The new freedoms in painting technique that post-war American painting had brought to the international scene may have had some impact on Picasso, as Miró acknowledged it had on himself, but Picasso had never at any time in his long career embraced abstraction–he abjured the very idea of it. And as if to make that point, and to broadcast it to the art world from the halls of the Palais des Papes, Picasso positively reveled in his love of the figure in the mousquetaires and other late paintings.
Picasso had summoned the name of Van Gogh in this cause as far back as 1935, when he and Christian Zervos were discussing the growing interest in abstraction at that time. “Abstract art is only painting,” Picasso declared. “What about drama?... It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is... What forces our interest is Cézanne’s anxiety–that's Cézanne’s lesson; the torments of Van Gogh–that is, that actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham” (quoted in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, pp. 9 and 11).
Picasso completed fewer than twenty canvases after painting the present Homme assis; the last work in oils is dated 1 June 1972 (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 399). The artist created around 180 other pictures during this period, all works on paper, including some large and wonderfully elaborate wash drawings. His final known opus is a felt-tip drawing of a male nude executed on 21 February 1973. But a painter he remained to the very end. According to Ingo F. Walther, on the evening of 7 April 1973, Picasso retouched with white paint the canvas Nu couché et tête, dated 25 May 1972 (I) (Zervos, vol. 33, no. 398). Picasso died shortly before midday 8 April in his home at Mougins, at the age of 91 and one-half years.
[A] Picasso with Le couple, painted 9 October 1970, in Mougins, on the artist’s 89th birthday, 25 October 1970.
NYPARHT
[B] Pablo Picasso, Mardi Gras, Mougins 2 February 1972 (I). Private collection.
[C] Pablo Picasso, Homme assis, Mougins, 2 February 1972 (III). Private collection.
Pablo Picasso, Personnage à la pelle, July-November 1971. Private Collection.
Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624. The Wallace Collection, London
Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez, 1953. Private Collection.
Installation photograph, Pablo Picasso, 1970-1972, Avignon, 1973. Photograph by Mario Atzinger. Homme Assis, the present lot, is located on the lower tier, third painting from the left
NYPRARIQ