Painter at Work

Between 1963 and 1965, Picasso seems to have been caught up in a frantic desire to paint. On the back cover of a sketchbook from 1963 he writes: «Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants me to do.» The canvases came in quick succession, all with a common denominator: the very practice of art. The theme of the painter and the model reappears over and over again with unusual strength in all its variants, from the tension between them to the model posing alone in the place of creation par excellence, the studio, or the painter alone, as in this oil painting which shares many of the formal aspects of the artist’s final period, beginning in 1964. Taking absolute freedom and spontaneity as a premise, Picasso invents a new form of pictorial expression marked by a stenographic style, the materiality of the paint and the gestural nature of the brushstrokes, some quite thick and others very fluid. In short, a brutal and primal aesthetic, often non finito, by which the ageing artist returns to the fresh and naive gaze of childhood, as in this luminous “Painter at Work”, expressively restless and penetrating, the characteristic blue striped sweater revealing it a self-portrait.