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Lot Essay
Executed on 29 January 1972, Buste de femme reveals the incredible creative energy that Picasso retained even when he was advanced in years, and also provides an insight into the artist's mind at this time. Picasso had celebrated his 90th birthday the previous year, yet regardless of this continued to work at an incredible pace, belying his years. This picture shows a woman's head, with elements highlighted in a gouache grisaille which adds a sense of substance, of volumetric form, to the face. In this way, the image here combines the almost hieroglyphic signs and symbols with which Picasso had so often painted his second wife Jacqueline, his most constant Muse and inspiration, during the final decades of his life while recalling the stylistic innovations that he had made over half a century earlier while working towards his proto-Cubist masterpiece.
During the course of this period, perhaps inspired in part by the increasing number of high-profile displays and exhibitions of his work taking place around the world, Picasso appears to have looked back to a range of his former stylistic innovations, revisiting them, for instance in the finely-worked drawings of bulbous heads, also of 1972, which resemble his sculptures of Marie-Thérèse Walter from the early 1930s. Despite showing the head of a woman, Buste de femme also recalls, especially in the dark orbs with which Picasso has depicted her eyes, the artist's own self-portraits, especially those from the period just preceding Cubism.
That sense of solidity, which relates to those earlier paintings, also adds a mask-like quality to Buste de femme, perhaps reflecting the degree to which mortality was on the artist's mind, however much he tried to banish it. This sense of the picture's role as a form of memento mori is accentuated by the fact that the black stare has a hieratic quality which recalls the Fayum mummy portraits found in ancient Egyptian burials. At the same time, there is a clear sense in which the deliberately gestural surface of this work shows the artist's own life force, crystallised in the form of art.
During the course of this period, perhaps inspired in part by the increasing number of high-profile displays and exhibitions of his work taking place around the world, Picasso appears to have looked back to a range of his former stylistic innovations, revisiting them, for instance in the finely-worked drawings of bulbous heads, also of 1972, which resemble his sculptures of Marie-Thérèse Walter from the early 1930s. Despite showing the head of a woman, Buste de femme also recalls, especially in the dark orbs with which Picasso has depicted her eyes, the artist's own self-portraits, especially those from the period just preceding Cubism.
That sense of solidity, which relates to those earlier paintings, also adds a mask-like quality to Buste de femme, perhaps reflecting the degree to which mortality was on the artist's mind, however much he tried to banish it. This sense of the picture's role as a form of memento mori is accentuated by the fact that the black stare has a hieratic quality which recalls the Fayum mummy portraits found in ancient Egyptian burials. At the same time, there is a clear sense in which the deliberately gestural surface of this work shows the artist's own life force, crystallised in the form of art.