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PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Buste de jeune garçon signed “Picasso” (upper left); dated “15.12.64.I...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:400,000.00 - 600,000.00 USD
PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Buste de jeune garçon signed “Picasso” (upper left); dated “15.12.64.I...

PABLO PICASSO

(1881-1973)

Buste de jeune garçon

signed “Picasso” (upper left); dated “15.12.64.III” (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

73 x 54 cm (28 3⁄4 x 21 1⁄4 in.)

painted in December 1964

Estimate: £275,000–425,000

$400,000–600,000





Provenance

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Galleria Internazionale, Milan (acquired from the above in 1971)

Marisa Del Re Gallery,New york

Acquired from the above by the present owner on April 16, 1974




Literature

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1983, vol. 24 (Oeuvres de 1964), no. 326 (illustrated, pl. 127)

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This painting belongs to a series of works that Picasso embarked upon towards the end of 1964 based upon the visage of a young boy (Zervos, vol. 24, nos. 313-328). It is amongst the most resolved and successful of the group and demonstrates Picasso’s use of highly simplified, even calligraphic forms to describe human features. In many respects the virtuosity evident in such works recalls the fact that Picasso had by this stage in his career become one of the most prolific ceramicists in Modern Art. Decorating large quantities of ceramics through the rapid creation of powerful, emblematic images pared down to their most essential ingredients had a reciprocal influence on his painting. In the late paintings the viewer is carried away by the sheer vitality of his paint application and the fresh, youthful appeal of the resulting works, often, as here, rendered with the use of bright and primary colours. Furthermore his use of black pigment applied here in the main features and hair of the head, describes light as much as it does shadow. In this respect the lesson of Matisse is also apparent, as Matisse had always advocated the use of black to create the illusion of light. If Matisse’s late works appeared to be concerned with the regaining of youth and innocence in old age, this is no less true of Picasso. In the present work this is enacted not just in the expressive, impetuous technique, but also in the youth of the subject itself, who wears the striped sailor’s tee shirt that Picasso himself often sported. Indeed one of the best known anecdotes of Picasso’s late period is that when viewing an exhibition of children’s drawings he had commented that as a child he could draw like Raphael, and it had been his life’s work to learn to draw like a child.