Pablo Picasso

William Waller, Jr., Mississippi
Bequest of the above

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1965 et 1967, vol. XXV, Paris, 1972, no. 254, illustrated p. 118

Executed on cream wove paper. The left edge of the sheet is perforated and and has been removed from a spiral bound sketchbook. The right corners of the sheet are rounded. Apart from 2 pindot stains near the top of the sheet, the work is in excellent condition.
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The present work sees Picasso returning to the theme of family and age in a wonderfully detailed example of his mature work from 1966. Two exhibitions held in 2009—Picasso: Challenging the Past at the National Gallery in London and Picasso: Mosqueteros at the Gagosian Gallery in New York—are part of an ongoing reassessment of Picasso’s late oeuvre. The works of the last twenty years of Picasso’s life, including his images of musketeers and his variations on the theme of old master paintings, are increasingly seen as a fitting culmination to the career of the greatest artist of the twentieth century. His late heads and busts represent a psychological projection of a complex and multifaceted identity, an amalgamation of influences and personas that made up his iconography. As Simonetta Fraquelli writes: "the extensive re-evaluation of his late work since his death has highlighted its undiminished power and originality. His capacity for emotional depth and painterly freedom in his late painting, together with his wide ranging engagement with the imagery of the great paintings of the past, was to have a lasting influence on the development of neoexpressionist art from the early 1980s onwards" (Simonetta Fraquelli, "Looking at the Past to Defy the Present: Picasso’s Painting 1946-1973" in Picasso: Challenging the Past (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery, London, 2009, p. 146).