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Lot Essay
In May 1964, Picasso began a series of paintings and drawings of male portraits, first in profile and then later seen frontally or in three-quarter view. The subjects range from young, virile men in the prime of life—frequently unshaven and sometimes seen smoking or wearing a workman’s cap—to older men, with their bald heads and more grizzled appearance, resembling the artist. Invariably, they are clad in a blue and white striped fisherman’s shirt.
As photographs of Picasso reveal, the artist was fond of wearing a similarly striped shirt. Through this simple article of clothing, Picasso was surely connecting himself to the omnipresence of the sea in the life of Mediterranean communities. Picasso had lived by the sea while he was growing up, and even with the attractions and pleasures of cosmopolitan Paris or other capitals to distract him, he rarely failed to take an extended summer holiday on one of France’s many diverse coastlines, impatiently awaiting the opportunity to revitalize or invent anew some aspect of his art.
Following the end of the Second World War, Picasso completely transplanted his life, work and lovers to the Mediterranean, as if to definitively enter and possess its powerful mythology. Those who practiced the professions of fisherman or maritime trader, or local seafaring of any kind, were living, modern-day agents, awesome men in their own right, of that hardy vocation by which Mediterranean culture had evolved, expanded and flourished throughout the centuries. To Picasso, these figures embodied a very ancient provenance as well, signifying archetypes that one finds throughout Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and the historians' accounts of the great battles in the Greek and Roman naval traditions.
In 1964, Picasso was eighty-three years old and was about to commence through his own artistic practice an intense re-imagining of himself at various stations in his long life and varied career. He would appropriate many different personae as extensions of himself—the boy, the young man, the fully mature man in the prime of his life, leading to where he stood now at the corner of old age. One instantly recognizes from these heads how much pleasure it must have given him to cast himself fleetingly as these various characters, so completely drawn in every facet of their personalities that they comprise the length and breadth of an entire comédie humaine. Young or old, Picasso always endowed these subjects with his own famously powerful gaze. One may correctly view this series, as the segue to the peintre series which followed in mid-October, followed by a return to the artist and model theme, then to a revival of the bearded men in 1965-1966, and finally the great mousquetaires who took precedence in Picasso’s work of early 1967.
Picasso was a life-long smoker, but it was inevitable that he should have to give it up sometime, and this probably occurred just before or following his surgery for an ulcer in the fall of 1965. The present series with its many fumeurs may constitute the artist's valediction to a favorite habit. According to John Richardson, the elderly Picasso had been sexually impotent from around his eightieth year, that is, sometime in the early 1960s. Picasso himself made the association between smoking and love-making as he was commiserating in a conversation with the photographer Brassaï: "Age has forced us to abandon smoking, but the desire remains. It's the same with love" (quoted in M.L.Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 455).
As photographs of Picasso reveal, the artist was fond of wearing a similarly striped shirt. Through this simple article of clothing, Picasso was surely connecting himself to the omnipresence of the sea in the life of Mediterranean communities. Picasso had lived by the sea while he was growing up, and even with the attractions and pleasures of cosmopolitan Paris or other capitals to distract him, he rarely failed to take an extended summer holiday on one of France’s many diverse coastlines, impatiently awaiting the opportunity to revitalize or invent anew some aspect of his art.
Following the end of the Second World War, Picasso completely transplanted his life, work and lovers to the Mediterranean, as if to definitively enter and possess its powerful mythology. Those who practiced the professions of fisherman or maritime trader, or local seafaring of any kind, were living, modern-day agents, awesome men in their own right, of that hardy vocation by which Mediterranean culture had evolved, expanded and flourished throughout the centuries. To Picasso, these figures embodied a very ancient provenance as well, signifying archetypes that one finds throughout Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and the historians' accounts of the great battles in the Greek and Roman naval traditions.
In 1964, Picasso was eighty-three years old and was about to commence through his own artistic practice an intense re-imagining of himself at various stations in his long life and varied career. He would appropriate many different personae as extensions of himself—the boy, the young man, the fully mature man in the prime of his life, leading to where he stood now at the corner of old age. One instantly recognizes from these heads how much pleasure it must have given him to cast himself fleetingly as these various characters, so completely drawn in every facet of their personalities that they comprise the length and breadth of an entire comédie humaine. Young or old, Picasso always endowed these subjects with his own famously powerful gaze. One may correctly view this series, as the segue to the peintre series which followed in mid-October, followed by a return to the artist and model theme, then to a revival of the bearded men in 1965-1966, and finally the great mousquetaires who took precedence in Picasso’s work of early 1967.
Picasso was a life-long smoker, but it was inevitable that he should have to give it up sometime, and this probably occurred just before or following his surgery for an ulcer in the fall of 1965. The present series with its many fumeurs may constitute the artist's valediction to a favorite habit. According to John Richardson, the elderly Picasso had been sexually impotent from around his eightieth year, that is, sometime in the early 1960s. Picasso himself made the association between smoking and love-making as he was commiserating in a conversation with the photographer Brassaï: "Age has forced us to abandon smoking, but the desire remains. It's the same with love" (quoted in M.L.Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 455).