Buste d'homme

With his elaborate goatee beard, long curls, ornate lace collar and seventeenth-century doublet, the subject of Pablo Picasso’s Buste d’homme is instantly recognisable as the figure of the musketeer, the character who, perhaps more than any other, has come to define the artist’s late work. Painted on 25 January 1969, this work dates from one of the most prolific years of Picasso’s life, a time when he was painting with an irrepressible verve, filling canvas after canvas with bold, gestural and highly coloured images.

‘In Picasso’s oeuvre, man always appears in disguise or playing a role’, Marie-Laure Bernadac has written. ‘He is either the painter at work, the musketeer, or the matador and is portrayed with the attributes of his virility such as the long pipe, a sabre or a sword. In 1966, a new figure emerges in the iconography of Picasso that eventually comes to dominate the period. It is that of the gentleman of the “Siècle d'Or,” half-Spanish, half-Dutch, and dressed in colourful costume, with cap, boots and large feathered cap and collar... As Christan Gelhaar points out, the painter in his old age, feeling the gradual diminishing of his vital forces seems to find a second youth in the gallant attire of these musketeers’ (M.L. Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972,’ in Late Picasso, exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 43).

In early 1966, while in Mougins convalescing from surgery he had undergone some months previously, Picasso re-read Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. He had just begun painting again, and before long a new character entered his work, the musketeer, or the Spanish version of the seventeenth-century cavalier, the hidalgo, a rakish nobleman skilled with the sword and daring in his romantic exploits. The brave and virile musketeer was strongly identifiable with the artist himself, but also provided Picasso with a pretext to indulge in his love of Rembrandt, Velázquez and other great painters of the Baroque.

Like many of the artist’s late works, the portraits of musketeers were created in series. Essentially traditional in pose and format, the musketeer became a favoured subject over the next few years and allowed Picasso to explore different means of representing the human form within a strict framework. Picasso found this method of constant variation especially useful when exploring old master subjects. It was an effective means of probing and re-interpreting a style or manner, and the repeated appearance of these subjects demonstrates the playful way in which the artist liked to project his own personality and fantasies into these characters from the past.

Many of Picasso’s musketeers proclaim their Spanish heritage in his use of the national colours of red and golden yellow, which, as in Buste d’homme, contrast powerfully with the blues and purples of the sitter’s face and bright white of his collar. If the archetype of this work is the splendid celebration of seventeenth-century aristocracy through the portraiture of the Spanish and Dutch golden age, Picasso’s expropriation of the subject displays the master’s usual biting and provocative tone. The musketeer is not the young gentleman in full attire, but an old man: the elegant subject disguises the witty and powerful artist in his late 80s, his eyes fiercely piercing the spectator, his power of seduction still intact and defiant.

Buste d’homme was included in the landmark exhibition, Pablo Picasso, 1969-1970, held from May to October 1970 at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, France. Organised by Christian and Yvonne Zervos, this historic show positioned Picasso as a leading figure of contemporary art and a key proponent of painting at a time when the austere language of Minimalism reigned supreme. Here, viewers were confronted with a vibrant throng of musketeers, nude women, children and other figures that had defined the artist’s work for the prior two years.

After remaining in the artist’s family, this painting was presented as a gift to Colette Jacquemin. A successful entrepreneur with a number of pharmacies across Paris, Colette’s second marriage was to the Spanish artist José Vilato Ruiz Fin. ‘Fin’ as he was known, was Pablo Picasso’s nephew, the son of his younger sister Lola. This relationship introduced Colette to the fascinating world of contemporary art in 1960s Paris. She and Fin hosted dinners for writers and artists at their Montmartre apartment and were regulars at the Tabac Vert in Montparnasse, dining with the likes of Óscar Domínguez and César.

Colette became an integral part of Fin’s extended family and was welcomed by Picasso and his wife Jacqueline into their home, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, and into their closely knit circle of friends. The warmth between the two couples is evident in the remaining letters and postcards, in which Jacqueline refers to Colette as ‘ma petite soeur’. Picasso appreciated Colette for her good humour, unwavering dedication to his nephew’s artistic career, and amusingly, on one occasion, her own unwitting contribution to his oeuvre. After a visit to Notre-Dame-de-Vie when she brought one of her mother’s legendary ‘Pithivier’ cakes, which Picasso loved, she found that its special baking tin had vanished. This later gave way to much amusement when it reappeared as the wavy-edged bonnet on the baby in Picasso’s plaster cast of La Poussette (Museum Ludwig, Cologne).

The late 1960s were marked by personal tragedy for Colette as Fin fell seriously ill, finally dying in 1969. With heartfelt appreciation for the loving care she took of their brother during his extended illness, each of Fin’s four siblings gave Colette a painting by their uncle, Picasso, as a fitting expression of the family’s gratitude. Buste d’homme was one such work.