Original heliogravure from the "Comedie Humaine" series. Published in a limited (un-numbered) edition of 1500 of Verve magazine number 29-30 in 1954.
Picasso was a long-time admirer of the work of Honoré de Balzac, the great 19th century French realist playwright and novelist.
In 1954, aware of the artist’s interest in Balzac, the publisher Tériade commissioned Picasso to create a series of illustrations depicting scenes from the writer’s greatest work, La Comédie Humaine. A collection of 137 interlinked short stories, novels and essays, La Comédie Humaine depicts life in the Bourbon Restoration period after the French Revolution and addresses themes such as money, power, social success, maternity, paternity and women, society and sex. The stories take place in a variety of locations, but some characters are interlinked and feature in more than one story.
Tériade dedicated an entire issue of his revue magazine, Verve to Picasso’s response to this work. Picasso created a suite of 180 drawings and a set of twelve colour lithographs after works in coloured crayon to interpret the stories of La Comédie Humaine. For the printing, Picasso employed the expertise of the renowned lithography studio Atelier Mourlot in Paris, where the prints were made under the artist’s direction in a limited edition of 1,500.
It was a long process involving the preparation of separate printing stones for each colour.
This image, not a lithograph, but a heliogravure in sombre black, contrasts with the lighter, more comedic colour lithographs illustrating the other stories, yet it has a humourous element to it. We see multiple expressive portraits drawn in a fluid, almost light-heated style, but on closer inspection, the recurring theme of the series,of youth fading into old age, can be discerned.
A thematic analysis of the series not only shows how central the subject of artist and model was within the 'Human Comedy' staged by Picasso, but also how Picasso was able to link the theme specifically to a questioning of old age and his own late-career concerns. In this image there is no artist, but the almost Hogarthian faces show the different ages of humanity. In some ways the drawings for La Comédie Humaine can be considered a parody of Picasso’s Vollard Suite of from 1933, in which the artist is cast as a classical sculptor at the height of his powers only to find twenty years later that the idealised artist-god has shrunken in stature and shows his age in all too human terms.
La Comédie Humaine marks the beginning of Picasso's late period where he starts to confront both his own mortality and historical identity.
