Pablo Picasso

PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881-Mougins, 1973).
Untitled. 16.07.68
Wax on paper.
Signed and dated in the right margin.
Measurements: 16 x 28 cm; 46 x 56 cm (with frame).

This original drawing, made with blue crayons on paper and signed by Pablo Picasso on July 16, 1968, is a late but highly revealing example of his inexhaustible creative vitality. We observe a barely sketched male figure, reduced to its most essential gestures: a head with caricatured features, bordered by tangled hair, goatee and mustache, perhaps alluding to the archetype of the artist, the poet or the baroque nobleman.

The economy of the stroke, swift and vibrant, reveals the absolute mastery of an author who, in his old age, has purified all artifice. The line flows with instinctive freedom, as if dictated by a plastic memory that justifies itself. V-shaped eyebrows, dots for the eyes, a mouth concealed behind a zigzagging handlebar moustache, and so on. The head seems to be crowned by a cap that gives it a comic and theatrical, almost Cervantine arie. In the lower part of the drawing, a zigzag movement evokes the ground, the sea or perhaps the very energy of the character. This spontaneous, almost calligraphic gesture articulates the space without the need for background or scenery.

Dated 1968, when Picasso was already 87 years old, the work belongs to a twilight period in which the artist worked with feverish intensity. During these years, his style became increasingly playful, synthetic and uninhibited, bordering on the grotesque and childish with superb lucidity.

He responds to the archetype of the mental portrait, a Picassian emblem. It could be interpreted as an ambivalent figure-type: the wise man, the buffoon, the artist, the spectator. It could also be seen as a veiled self-portrait, made with humor, without solemnity.

Creator of Cubism together with Braque, Picasso's painting was a turning point in the history of art. He began his studies in 1895, at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and only two years later he made his first solo exhibition at the cafe "Els Quatre Gats". After several short stays in Paris, Picasso settled definitively in the French capital in 1904. The definitive international recognition will come in 1939, as a result of the retrospective that the MOMA in New York dedicates to him. During the following decades, anthological exhibitions will be dedicated to him all over the world, in Rome, Milan, Paris, Cologne and New York, among many other cities. He is represented in the most important museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London or the Reina Sofia in Madrid.

This small drawing is an eloquent testimony of the expressive power of the last Picasso. Its apparent simplicity encloses a poetic complexity: the line becomes language, the gesture a vital sign.