Pablo Picasso, Tête d'homme barbu

Painted on 5th June 1965. signed Picasso (centre right); dated 5.6.65.III on the reverse. oil on canvas. 46 by 38cm. Estimate 350,000—450,000 GBP

PROVENANCE: Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1965 à 1967, Paris, 1972, vol. 25, no. 155, illustrated pl. 85
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 65-162, illustrated p. 214

NOTE: Tête d'homme barbu belongs to a group of male heads and busts that Picasso painted in May and June 1965. Executed in quick succession and with an extraordinary sense of energy, these works bear witness to the vitality and creative urge that characterised Picasso's late years. Having gone through many phases of stylistic and technical experimentation, by this time Picasso had acquired a confidence of expression and freedom of execution that enabled him to paint works in quick, spontaneous brush-strokes. Rather than ponder over the details of human anatomy and physiognomy, the artist was able to isolate those elements of his subject that fascinated and preoccupied him, and to depict them with a contemporary style and a sense of wit entirely his own. Whilst any male portrait in Picasso's art certainly contains some degree of introspection, in the present work the figure is shown wearing the striped shirt that identifies him as Picasso himself.

In his discussion of the various guises and metamorphoses of the male figure in Picasso's late paintings, Kirk Varnedoe commented: 'Amid all these camouflages, however, the one avatar Picasso embraced most consistently in his final decades was the one with the least disguised self-reference: the figure of the artist [...] The focus was not on his own circumstances. Neither live models nor traditional palettes, which are constant attributes of these late studio scenes, had anything to do with his practice, and the artists in question almost never display his features in more than allusive fashion; they tend to be stock types, typically bearded, which Picasso never was' (K. Varnedoe, 'Picasso's Self-Portraits', in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 162).