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Lot Essay
Executed on 5 June 1967, Femme, fleurs et oiseaux and Trois têtes d'hommes are two remarkable works on paper sharing one sheet, each displaying Picasso’s unyielding energy and imagination in the twilight of his astoundingly prolific career. Deftly blurring the lines between drawing and painting, the artist highlights his virtuosity as a draughtsman through a broad handling of brush and ink wash, creating an emphatic contrast of light and deep shadows through moody chiaroscuro. The two pictures, while different in theme, reveal an exceptional world of whimsy, romance and mythology from which Picasso drew so many subjects in his Post-War period.
During a time of convalescence between late 1965 and early 1966, Picasso revisited the classics which had captivated him as a youth, re-reading plays and novels by William Shakespeare, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas. At the time, he was living with his second wife and arguably greatest muse, Jacqueline Roque, in their Mougins home Notre-Dame-de-Vie. Now in his mid-80s, his movements hindered by declining health and his virility waning, Picasso spent his days transforming himself into dashing, rakish figures from his storybooks, replete with an elegant beard and a plumed hat. In an enthusiastic output, he overwhelmed the space of the villa with a veritable legion of pictorial seventeenth-century cavaliers and adventurers, outfitted in elaborate seventeenth-century costumes. As he had done throughout his career with the harlequin and the minotaur, Picasso employed the musketeer to reaffirm his potency and charm, and their bravado and proclivity for amorous liaison served as the ideal foil for the artist in the last years of a long and eventful life.
Picasso’s fascination with these heroic figures of old seemed the natural progression after having spent the previous decades engaging with—or perhaps waging a battle against—the great masters. As he did with the literature of his childhood, Picasso returned to the artists he would have likely encountered as a young painter at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and later at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. He had spent the 1950s confronting the masterpieces of his predecessors, interpreting iconic works such as Eugène Delacroix’s Les femmes d’Alger, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe in a manner which suggested both reverence and an arrogant challenge.
The pose of the nude in Femme, fleurs et oiseaux seems to draw a direct parallel from variations on the theme of the harem scene in Picasso’s work, most notably his Femmes d’Alger series of 1955, which drew from Delacroix’s masterpiece. The series had been inspired by what Picasso saw as Jacqueline’s inarguably striking resemblance to the squatting odalisque on the right of the composition, and it is Jacqueline who is undoubtedly the source for the profile on the verso of the present work. She would come to embody the notion of feminine sensuality throughout more works of art than any of Picasso’s other muses, and if the musketeer was a stand-in for the artist, this dashing figure engages with her counterpart in countless sheets and canvases. Here, with one arm behind her head and the other stretched forward as if in the midst of a vigorous dance, she evokes the infamous pose of the second figure from the left in Picasso’s iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The three cunning figures on the verso, in their period clothes and hairstyles, watch from the shadows, enraptured as the captivating beauty dances amongst the flowers, the sheet a forbidden barrier to be crossed unabashedly by the artist.
During a time of convalescence between late 1965 and early 1966, Picasso revisited the classics which had captivated him as a youth, re-reading plays and novels by William Shakespeare, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas. At the time, he was living with his second wife and arguably greatest muse, Jacqueline Roque, in their Mougins home Notre-Dame-de-Vie. Now in his mid-80s, his movements hindered by declining health and his virility waning, Picasso spent his days transforming himself into dashing, rakish figures from his storybooks, replete with an elegant beard and a plumed hat. In an enthusiastic output, he overwhelmed the space of the villa with a veritable legion of pictorial seventeenth-century cavaliers and adventurers, outfitted in elaborate seventeenth-century costumes. As he had done throughout his career with the harlequin and the minotaur, Picasso employed the musketeer to reaffirm his potency and charm, and their bravado and proclivity for amorous liaison served as the ideal foil for the artist in the last years of a long and eventful life.
Picasso’s fascination with these heroic figures of old seemed the natural progression after having spent the previous decades engaging with—or perhaps waging a battle against—the great masters. As he did with the literature of his childhood, Picasso returned to the artists he would have likely encountered as a young painter at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and later at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. He had spent the 1950s confronting the masterpieces of his predecessors, interpreting iconic works such as Eugène Delacroix’s Les femmes d’Alger, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe in a manner which suggested both reverence and an arrogant challenge.
The pose of the nude in Femme, fleurs et oiseaux seems to draw a direct parallel from variations on the theme of the harem scene in Picasso’s work, most notably his Femmes d’Alger series of 1955, which drew from Delacroix’s masterpiece. The series had been inspired by what Picasso saw as Jacqueline’s inarguably striking resemblance to the squatting odalisque on the right of the composition, and it is Jacqueline who is undoubtedly the source for the profile on the verso of the present work. She would come to embody the notion of feminine sensuality throughout more works of art than any of Picasso’s other muses, and if the musketeer was a stand-in for the artist, this dashing figure engages with her counterpart in countless sheets and canvases. Here, with one arm behind her head and the other stretched forward as if in the midst of a vigorous dance, she evokes the infamous pose of the second figure from the left in Picasso’s iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The three cunning figures on the verso, in their period clothes and hairstyles, watch from the shadows, enraptured as the captivating beauty dances amongst the flowers, the sheet a forbidden barrier to be crossed unabashedly by the artist.