This is my late Picasso lithograph. I picked this up at auction at the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Gala here in San Francisco. It was on sale for the event and astonishingly inexpensive.
Aside from that, the value for me is looking at an artist look at themselves and the craft of art conceptualization. Picasso has chosen as his subject the motif of the artist painting the model. He has painted himself (as artist) as a king with crown and pantaloons and picadil. He paints himself painting himself. Yet in the canvas we see the artist humbly present himself seated not standing, bald not full, and poor not rich. In this way we understand that the artist's role is too lie. We present ourselves as something other than the truth perhaps to tell a truth.
As Picasso has said "art is lie that tells a truth."
He paints himself again in an interior with stained glass. As though the artist paints within a church or that the studio is a sacrosanct ground. A place where the Lord make a visitation. Again we see that the Artist the übermensch is a superman, he is exceptional and super normal or super real or surreal.
Finally the model is presented. She looks less cubistic then what we normally see with Picasso. That is we do not see many sides of her here. She resembles more a Matisse really. Picasso believed Matisse was is only true 20th century competitor. The Michelangelo to his Leonardo. I can't quite figure the alternating green and blue line other than to think that this is a push and pull of warmth and cool in space. (The lines may be hard to see in the photograph, but make up the body of the model.) The model here has a mask, which immediately suggests that the woman who is presenting herself as a truth is actually underneath a visage of deceit. Her presentation of the self is just that.. a fiction.
So we have here an artist as king painting himself as a philosopher perhaps, within a church, in front of a model who we cannot see the truth of. From this image we learn some insight into what the job of the painter is. To make art that tells a deeper truth.
It's signed February 3rd, 1964. The second one.
Of course it goes without saying that in French, "trompe" is "to fool or to lie to." This act of being fooled by painting into believing that an image is real. And the irony of painting is that this truth comes from a deception. Can we agree that this is the same act a magician makes when presenting the prestige or the final flourish of an illusion. Your astonishment is the end goal. Your wonder is what we are after.