Tête d'homme

As 1943 dawned, Pablo Picasso remained holed up in his capacious apartment on the rue des Grand-Augustins. Paris was living under Nazi Occupation and the privations, angsts, and fear of war only increased with each passing day. On the 4 January, Picasso executed this powerful portrait – one of the rare occasions that he depicted a male figure. Using solely black pen, brush, and ink that stand in stark contrast to the luminous white sheet, this male bearded figure appears with furrowed brow, his harrowed expression and heavy-eyed gaze captured with expressive linear striations. With his head resting upon his hand, he is pictured in the traditional pose of melancholy, a motif to which Picasso would return in the iconic Le Marin, painted in October of this year (Zervos, vol. 13, no. 167; Private collection).

The motif of a bearded man would come to dominate Picasso’s art of the spring of 1943. From the time that Picasso executed the present work, he continued to return to this bearded figure, creating a host of studies leading up to the realization of the important sculpture, L’homme au mouton. Here, a full length male figure holds a lamb, a symbol both of hope, as well as a powerful universal expression, as Picasso explained, of ‘a human feeling, a feeling that exists now as it has always existed’ (quoted in S. A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years 1937-1945, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1998, p. 34). He created this sculpture first in plaster in early April of this year (Spies, no. 280.1; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid). It was later cast in bronze, which now resides in the Musée Picasso, Paris (Spies, no. 280.II).

Despite being offered the option to flee Paris at the outbreak of the war, Picasso decided to remain in his adopted home. Unable to travel and with his social circle considerably reduced, Picasso devoted himself to his art. He worked at a prolific pace, picturing his immediate surroundings, including still lifes and portraits of his wartime lover, Dora Maar. While he never depicted the war itself, a feeling of sobriety, sometimes angst and melancholy, darkness and intensity, defines his work of this time. ‘I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done,’ he stated after the Liberation. ‘Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my style has changed under the war’s influence’ (quoted in P.D. Whitney, ‘Picasso is Safe,’ in San Francisco Chronicle, 3 September 1944, in ibid., p. 13).

Just as his famed Weeping Women works of 1937 conveyed through the painted features of Maar the artist’s own sense of fear and angst, his lover’s face a mirror to his feelings, as well as a reflection of the universal sentiment of a world gripped by terror, so the present work likewise conveys a sense of the artist’s personal despair. Picasso has portrayed this figure with what appears to be a striped shirt, the garment for which he has become renowned. He was frequently portrayed wearing this Breton sailor’s top, and would continue to depict male figures sporting this same distinctive piece of clothing for the rest of his life. While Picasso himself was not bearded, it is possible that this melancholic man was a reflection of the artist too, a portrayal of his own sense of boredom mixed with the underlying worry that characterized life in Occupied France.