Jeune homme de profil

In August 1944, the Liberation of Paris raged and the city was finally freed of Nazi Occupation. In the weeks following the Liberation, Pablo Picasso, who had remained in the city for the duration, came to be regarded as a Resistance hero. Hailed as an icon of the survival both of creativity and the arts, his work was framed as the expression of free will and perseverance against oppression. Allied soldiers, G.I.s, foreign journalists, photographers, writers, collectors, and art lovers alike flooded his studio, each eager to meet and pay their respects to the great Spanish artist.

In October 1944, the famed war photographer and friend of the artist, Lee Miller, came to visit Picasso in his studio. Miller recorded her trip with a series of photographs of the famed artist posing with a selection of his latest works, as well as the 1943 canvas, Le Marin, and some smaller, classically rendered portraits of young boys that the artist painted in August of this year. ‘He showed me his portraits of imaginary FFI boys,’ Miller wrote of the group of paintings next to which Picasso chose to be pictured, ‘The faces on the canvases are exactly like those of the rifle-slinging boys in the street…gentle and ferocious, poetic and buoyant, young but wary, scarcely bearded but with warm eyes’ (‘In Paris…Picasso Still at Work’, 15 October 1944, Vogue, New York, pp. 98-149).

Picasso had painted a series of four works on paper in August, each featuring the profiles of similarly aged, young male figures, looking sincerely, perhaps even solemnly out of the picture plane (Zervos, vol. 14, nos. 30, 31, 33, 37). As Miller described, these young Resistance fighters, many of whom had just been fighting on the streets of the city during the weeks of the Liberation – Miller referred to them as ‘FFI’ boys, the acronym for ‘Forces françaises de l’Intérieur’ – had survived the war, escaping the imprisonment and death that many of their comrades had suffered. Tête de jeune garçon, dedicated to Georges Hugnet on 6 September 1944, features a similar youthful male figure as this August series. By dedicating the depiction of another of these troop of men to Hugnet, Picasso was perhaps paying tribute to his friend, a member of the Resistance himself and a close friend and ally of the artist throughout the dark days of the Occupation. 

Hugnet was an artist, poet, and writer, and a key figure of Surrealism, known for his collages. During the Second World War and Occupation of France, Hugnet joined the French Resistance. He published Non vouloir, one of the first Resistance tracts to be released in France, for which Picasso created four engravings. The pair saw each other frequently during the war, meeting at the Café de Flore and dining together at Le Catalan. Picasso’s play, written in the winter of 1941, Désir attrapé par la queue, was first read in the home of Michel and Louise Leiris at the beginning of 1944. The main parts were played by Leiris, Dora Maar, Hugnet, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, with Albert Camus as the director, and a number of other key figures in the Parisian intellectual and artistic avant-garde during the war. According to Michèle C. Cone, Hugnet, along with the poet Paul Eluard, also purchased works from Picasso during the war. An issue of Cahiers d’art from 1944 illustrated a number of works Picasso painted during the war years as being owned by Hugnet (Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution, Princeton, 1992, p. 147).