Article
Newsletter: Spring /Summer 2008
Completed on December 3, 1964, the painting is the penultima in a series of thirty canvases undertaken by the prolific artist at the beginning of his eighty-third year.
Like other late works by Picasso, the spontaneous facture and stylistic economy of means of Tete d'homme et nu assissuggest the artist's preoccupation at the time with process over product and the reduction of the figurative impulse to its most minimal, abstracted means. Also informed by the broad, calligraphic motifs with which Picasso had been embellishing his extensive production of ceramics, the work is the most authoritative and resolved in the series. The painting is especially useful in advanc ing the museum's mission as a teaching institution, as it engages concerns central to Picasso's work--among them seriality, gender relations, and the relationship between artist and subject, creator and muse.
Like other late works by Picasso, the spontaneous facture and stylistic economy of means of Tete d'homme et nu assissuggest the artist's preoccupation at the time with process over product and the reduction of the figurative impulse to its most minimal, abstracted means. Also informed by the broad, calligraphic motifs with which Picasso had been embellishing his extensive production of ceramics, the work is the most authoritative and resolved in the series. The painting is especially useful in advanc ing the museum's mission as a teaching institution, as it engages concerns central to Picasso's work--among them seriality, gender relations, and the relationship between artist and subject, creator and muse.
