‘This shrapnel-like fragment of a human face evoques the mortal fears so prevalent during the turbulent years of the Second World War. Constant reminders of death weighed upon those who, like Picasso, remained in occupied France. Tragic news and difficult living conditions were part of daily existence, particularly in 1943 as the war progressed.
Despite these adverse conditions, Picasso continued his Artistic production in his Paris studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. Witnesses remarked on the great risks taken by Picasso and friends in the Resistance who, in the presence of the German patrols, secretly transported the plaster originals and their bronze casts back and forth from the artist’s studio to the foundry; the creation of these objects, according to Antonina Vallentin, was an “affirmation of life against the destructive efforts of the enemy” [1].
Cast after an original in fired clay, the bronze head appears mineral, like the remains of a pulverized meteorite or the fossilized fragment of a worn, human skull. It belongs to a group of five heads of head studies (Spies 212-216) that are considered preparatory works for the disturbingly lifelike skull (Spies 219) of which a bronze example is in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris (Tête de mort, París, 1943). Each of the five earthenware originals was cast in bronze in editions of four. According to Brassaï, the bronzes were made before the end of September 1943, several weeks after the Allied invasion of Italy and the armistice with the new Italian government, and almost one and a half years before the end of the was [2].
The heads of this series display organic forms. Their surfaces combine smooth hollow craters and swollen nodes that represent features of sculpted “flesh” such as the nose depicted here. The sculptures are both celestial and human, poetic and morbid. Their diverse, odd forms encapsulate all the barbarism of war as well as the metaphysical and existential questions of what it means to be human. Shakespeare used the same symbol in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (Hamlet, Act V, Scene I), when the protagonist contemplates the skull of his deceased friend Yorick. The war conditions heightened such philosophical questioning, especially for artists.
The bronzes were illustrated in a book on Picasso’s sculpture published by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler just after the war in 1949. The book listed 216 works, including a number of macabre cutout paper faces from 1943, whose torn features relate to these beautiful, but melancholic heads’ [3].
[1] VALLENTIN, Antonina. Pablo Picasso. Paris: Albin Michel, 1957, p. 362.
[2] BRASSAÏ [Gyula Halasz]. Conversations avec Picasso. Paris: Gallimard, 1964, pp. 71-78.
[3] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). Museo Picasso Málaga Collection. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 335-336.
