MASP

Pablo Picasso

Bust of a Man (The Athlete), 1909

  • Author:
    Pablo Picasso
  • Bio:
    Málaga, Espanha, 1881-Mougins, França ,1973
  • Title:
    Bust of a Man (The Athlete)
  • Date:
    1909
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    91 x 73,5 x 3 cm
  • Credit line:
    Aquisição, 1958
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00144
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



Picasso graduated from the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Barcelona in 1895, and participated in the Catalan modernist movement. His studio on Ravignan Street became a meeting point for artists and intellectuals. In the works of his first Parisian period, divided between the Blue Period and the Rose Period, the artist mainly depicted the life of poor and marginalized people with simplified shapes and bold spatial constructions inspired by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). Through these examples and through reference to the culture of the peoples of Africa and Oceania, Picasso developed an original formal synthesis between the object and its surroundings, which culminated in the creation of cubism, with the work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). In Bust of a Man (The Athlete), from the same period, Picasso makes a portrait with abrupt and geometric angles in the body and face. The power of the volumes conveys intense tactile sensations. Figure and background have the same gray and ocher tones. The stylistic experiments present in this work announce some of the main points of his production: the search for the sensation of movement in the still image, the abandonment of fidelity to the real model, and insistence on figuration, running against the grain of the abstractionist trends.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015

Source: Adriano Pedrosa (org.), Pocket MASP, São Paulo: MASP, 2020.





The faceted planes of the torso designed in the best Cubist manner mistakenly prompted the title Bust of a Man (The Athlete), which Zervos corrected by renaming it Man’s Bust. The canvas was painted in the summer of 1909, in the Horta de Ebro (now Horta de San Juan), two years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with which he visibly parts by adopting ochres and greys, closer to the quasimonochrome paroxysmal phase of Cubism (1911-1913) and, most of all, by turning down the flexibility of the curve in favor of a so-called crystallization of form. However while still bearing a somewhat Expressionist pathos, the canvas heralds the ultimately “analytical” Cubist style in the portraits of Vollard, Uhde, and Kahnweiler, as remarked by Camesasca (1987, p. 219).

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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