Tête d'Homme (Head of a Man)

Provenance

Private Collection, France, early 1960s.

Private Collection, Spain.

Acquired from the above by the previous owner.

Christies, South Kensington, 8 February 2013, lot 3.

Notes

The present lot was executed on the title page of Douglas Duncan (1958) The Private World of Pablo Picasso, New York.

Drawn in 1959, Tête d’Homme is a vibrant example of Pablo Picasso’s late graphic style, characterised by its extraordinary economy of line, expressive colour, and spirited immediacy. Executed in coloured crayon on the title page of David Douglas Duncan’s book on the artist, the work distils the human visage into a series of sweeping, fluid contours and bright tonal contrasts that capture both likeness and energy in a single, spontaneous gesture.

The face of a man as subject matter was a recurring motif in Picasso’s later years. By the late 1950s, the artist had increasingly turned to the image of the bearded man, the musketeer, and the Mediterranean patriarch as stand-ins for the creative self. These figures, half-heroic and halfcomic, became vehicles through which Picasso explored identity, virility, and artistic continuity. In Tête d’Homme, the head’s profile, outlined in loops of reddish pink, cyan, and deep violet, radiates vitality and humour. Its animated, almost calligraphic quality evokes the immediacy of drawing as an extension of thought.

The date situates this work within one of Picasso’s most productive and experimental periods, coinciding with his linocut innovations in Vallauris and his collaborations with photographer David Douglas Duncan, who was documenting the artist’s daily life. Indeed, this drawing’s directness and colourful vitality echo the same playfulness seen in his dedications and illustrated inscriptions of the time, in which art and friendship, gesture and inscription, merged seamlessly.

In its confident simplicity and chromatic exuberance, Tête d’Homme encapsulates Picasso’s genius for transforming the act of drawing into an act of being, an affirmation of the artist’s lifelong dialogue between mastery and spontaneity.

^1. Fernande Olivier (1965) Picasso and His Friends, New York: Appleton-Century