Richly rendered and immediately evocative, Pablo Picasso’s Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste is an exuberant canvas from the artist’s iconic series of Mousquetaire paintings. Initiated in 1967—the year of the present work—Picasso’s large-scale canvases depicting sword-brandishing musketeers are among the great subjects of the artist’s late oeuvre. Exemplifying the inventiveness, dynamism, and rich brushwork which characterize this group, the present work is wholly evocative of the palpable joie de vivre which infuses the very best of the artist’s final decade. Set against an ethereal ground gray wash, Picasso brings his musketeer to life with vigor and enthusiasm: rendered in bold strokes of black, blue and green pigment and lush swathes of white impasto, his figure is at once stoic and comical, legible while abstracted, historic in appearance yet utterly contemporary in nature. A centerpiece of the collection of Marcia and Stanley Gumberg for over two decades, Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste emerges as a stirring testament to Picasso’s singular mastery, creativity, and enduring energy in the final stage of his legendary career.
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While Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste dates from the first year that Picasso translated his musketeer onto large-scale canvases, his work on this theme began several years earlier with a series of engravings and works on paper. Outfitted in an engaging array of colorful regalia, festooning curls and variously elaborate whiskers, these figures often brandish a symbol of their (or perhaps the artist’s) enduring vitality and virility: a pipe, musical instrument, rapier, or even paintbrush. As Picasso developed this series through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, his dashing musketeers acquired a variety of personalities, including card players, musicians and pipe smokers—almost as if illustrating the artist's own adventures as a bon vivant. One scholar recalls:
“In December 1966, an army of seventeenth-century soldiers invaded Picasso’s pictorial world [see fig. 1]. These—soldiers of fortune, soldier-adventurers, Spaniards of the Golden Age—he referred to colloquially as ‘musketeers.’ The first contingent, mostly heads and busts, had austere faces, surrounded by long hair, ruffs and collars. Soon, however, Picasso was depicting his musketeers as full-length figures sporting swords, sabers, musket, or even the big lances with which cavalrymen of the 1600s were armed. At this point we see them clad in doublets, fancy hose, belts in vivid colors, embroidered with gold and silver, and hats adorned with multicolored plumes.”
In the present work, the musketeer puffs on a slender pipe, the smoke from which almost seems to fill the variegated ground of gray wash surrounding his head. In his other hand, he extends something to the viewer—perhaps a paintbrush, perhaps a second smoking instrument—as if inviting us to join him in his leisure.
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In his invocation of the musketeer, Picasso actively inserts himself within a storied art historical legacy that aligns him with some of his most-admired predecessors. The jaunty character of Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste immediately evokes d a lost, golden age of painting, allowing Picasso to escape the limitations of contemporary subject matter and explore the spirit of a past age. Picasso’s musketeers pay particular tribute to the work of two painters he had adored throughout his life: Velázquez and Rembrandt. Within the present work, Picasso absorbs the legacy of both these former artists into his own, highly personalized mythology. The artist’s esteem for and interest in Velázquez is readily apparent in his earlier examination of Velázquez's masterpiece Las Meninas, which he devoted numerous canvases to (see fig. 2). Indeed, in his cascading black curls, sleek mustache, black doublet and white cuffs, the figure of Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste is powerfully evocative of Velazquez’s own self-portrait in Las Meninas, who stands poised before his monumental easel, paintbrush outstretched. Likewise, while Picasso’s specific interest in the musketeers as subject matter began, according to the artist’s wife, "when Picasso started to study Rembrandt," his long standing interest in and admiration for the work of that artist is evident in his earlier work. Scholar Michael Fitzgerald reflects: “He painted Rembrandt and Saskia, based on the Dutch master’s portrait of himself and his wife... Picasso had admired Rembrandt’s art (particularly his prints) since at least the thirties. During his last decade he showed a particular appreciation for two, apparently contradictory, aspects of his predecessor’s work—the unflattering realism of Rembrandt’s late style, particularly self-portraits and depictions of the female nude, and the ornamental costumes of his early phase" (Exh. Cat. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford & Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso, The Artist’s Studio, 2001-02, p. 57).
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In the richly rendered surface of Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste, Picasso also pays homage to a figure of the more recent past: Vincent van Gogh (see fig. 3). An artist whose enthusiastic handling of pigment and color dominated his final years, van Gogh served as a powerful source of inspiration for Picasso in his own final decade. One scholar remarks, “Of all the artists with whom Picasso identified, van Gogh is the least often cited but probably the one that meant the most to him in later years. He talked of him as his patron saint, talked of him with intense admiration and compassion, never with any of his habitual irony or mockery. Van Gogh, like Cézanne earlier in Picasso’s life, was sacrosanct… I suspect that Picasso also wanted to galvanize his paint surface… with some of the Dutchman’s Dyonisian fervor. The surface of the late paintings has a freedom, a plasticity, that was never there before; they are more spontaneous, more expressive and more instinctive than virtually all his previous work” (John Richardson in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Late Picasso, Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, 1988, pp. 31-34).
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Within the elaborate ruff and cuffs of Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste, the roiling white pigment achieves an almost sculptural quality, as Picasso renders his impasto with a freedom and gusto highly reminiscent of van Gogh's own treatment of paint. In their vigorous execution and dynamism, the scumbled lines and energized brushwork of Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste are wholly emblematic of the freedom and spontaneity which Picasso found in his late work; of his final decade, the artist himself remarked, “I have less and less time and I have more and more to say” (the artist quoted in Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso Laureatus, Lausanne and Paris, 1971, p. 166). Indeed, there could be no better figurehead for Picasso’s final years than the gallant hero of Mousquetaire à la pipe, buste: a figure both historical and fantastical, novel while familiar, highly personalized yet enduringly universal.
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