Homme à la moustache

This vibrantly colored Homme à la moustache was painted just before Christmas Day in 1970. Here, Picasso has reduced the form of the musketeer—his iconic, late career-defining visual alter-ego—to a deftly rendered series of geometric lines and forms. The curled hair, goatee, and moustache that had become the key physiognomic attributes of this character are all still in evidence here, rendered in vibrant tones of blue and turquoise that complement the radiant orange and glowing yellow palette of this large canvas. This painting remained in Picasso’s collection for the final years of his life, before it passed to his daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso.
The figure of the musketeer—part historical, part fantastical—had entered Picasso’s repertoire of artistic stand-ins at the end of 1966. During a period of convalescence prior, Picasso began to re-read many classic works of literature, including Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, and perhaps most importantly, Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. In the spring of 1966, the tales of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis had clearly taken up residence in his psyche, as he began to draw figures in seventeenth-century costume, including the depiction of a cavalier-painter in front of his model. The first oil painting of this subject was completed in February 1967 (Zervos, vol. 25, no. 280). From this point onwards, the musketeer pervaded his imagination, as he filled canvases with depictions of these impressive, often ostentatiously-garbed, characterful musketeers that were so often vessels through which the artist portrayed himself.
Picasso was particularly endeared to his musketeers, and liked to ascribe personal qualities to them. Hélène Parmelin recalled how Picasso would play games in front of the canvases—he would point to one or another musketeer and remark, “With this one you’d better watch out. That one makes fun of us. That one is enormously satisfied. This one is a grave intellectual. And that one look how sad he is, the poor guy. He must be a painter” (quoted in Picasso: Tradition and Avant-garde, exh. cat., Museo del Prado, Madrid, 2006, p. 340). As the present work demonstrates, Picasso often used these figures as a means of proclaiming his Spanish heritage, employing the national colors of red and yellow. Having lived in France for the majority of his life, he still proudly felt his nationality, imparting this into his canvases of the time. As Marie-Laure Bernadac has written, “There are ornamental figures whose garments serve as a pretext for a blaze of blood-red and golden yellow, a resurgence of Spanishness, hispanidad” (Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 82).
Homme à la moustache was included in the landmark exhibition, Exposition Picasso, 1970-1972, which opened from May to September 1973 at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, France. Held shortly after the artist’s death in April of this year, this was the second of these shows, the first of which had taken place in 1970, and was dedicated to work that Picasso had produced during the final two years of his life. There, viewers were confronted with a vibrant throng of musketeers, nude women, children and other figures that had defined the artist’s late work—a jubilant and defiant celebration of life and art. The writer and friend of the artist, Edouard Pignon, had remarked of the first iteration of the exhibition, “whether the crowd is rising into the walls or whether the canvases are descending to mingle with the crowd. There is, finally, such a close correspondence between the crowd and the canvas, he says, that they are the same thing” (quoted in Picasso Mosqueteros, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009, p. 244)—words that remained as valid for this great, early posthumous exhibition of Picasso’s work.