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https://piction.clevelandart.org/cma/ump.di?e=24201A7DFB95BB1310EC65DF2BE1974AB6B425B076CA975AB24A8A05A09A0B4A&s=24247294&se=133247946&v=3&f=1958.43_o2.jpg

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Feb 21, 2006

Head of a Boy

1905–6

Pablo Picasso

(Spanish, 1881–1973)

Spain, 20th century

Possibly tempera on board

Support: Board, laid down on wood and cradled

Sheet: 24.6 x 18.6 cm (9 11/16 x 7 5/16 in.)

Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. 1958.43

Catalogue raisonné: Daix and Boudaille XV.7

Location

not on view

Did you know?

This Picasso drawing was once owned by the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946); a photograph of her apartment in Paris taken around 1907 shows the work hanging there.

Description

Created during Pablo Picasso's Rose Period (1904–6), this drawing features a warm palette and thin delicate lines. It might have been created during a summer that Picasso spent in Gósol, a Catalan village in the Spanish Pyrenees. The sheet presents an adolescent with pensive lips, almond-shaped eyes, and a dreamy expression—all characteristics that recur throughout the artist's depictions of figures around this time. Picasso began with a layer of pink opaque paint, allowing the color to give the boy's skin a warm tone that contrasts with the gray used to delineate his head. The subject's skull and jaw were then carefully modeled using a darker tone in roughly applied marks. The close-up view—stark in the present drawing—was later reused in Picasso's 1906 painting The Two Brothers (Kunstmuseum Basel), in which a nude adolescent carries a young boy on his back.

Artist biography

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973), the most prolific and influential artist of the 20th century, shifted the emphasis of art from its traditional concern with beauty toward radical innovation. The son of an art teacher, Picasso demonstrated remarkable talents as a child and entered the royal art academy in Madrid at age sixteen. Less than a year later, he abandoned his studies and soon joined several avant-garde artist and anarchist groups in Barcelona and Paris. After passing through a succession of stylistic periods, most notably the Blue (1901-1904) and Rose (1904-1906) Periods, he collaborated with Georges Braque (1882-1963) in 1908 to invent Cubism, a revolutionary method of restructuring pictorial space. Picasso remained active until his death in 1973. Although his art still appears radical, many of his works are over one hundred years old. Cubism, perhaps the most important development in 20th-century art, was invented around 1908 by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). The most revolutionary aspect of the style was not its obvious emphasis on geometric form; rather, it was the introduction of a radically new approach to configuring pictorial space. Since the Renaissance, artists had used various methods to create the illusion of distant space receding behind the canvas surface. The Cubists rejected that idea and collapsed space by compressing foreground, middle ground, and background into a continuous web of overlapping, intersecting planes. During the 1910s, other painters and sculptors embraced or adapted Cubism to their own ends. This revolutionary approach inspired a host of related movements and continues to influence the visual language of artists, architects, and designers throughout the world.

Inscriptions

Inscription

signed, lower left, in paint: Picasso / 905

Provenance

by 1907-?

Gertrude Stein [1874-1946], Paris

?-?

Horst Bohrmann [1906-1999], Berlin

?-?

Jacques Doucet [1853-1929], Paris

?-1937

(Jacques Seligmann & Co., Inc., New York, sold to Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Cleveland, OH)

1937-1957

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. [1889-1957], Cleveland, OH, bequest to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

1958-

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Citations

Dumas, Ann. "The Rose Period." In Picasso and Paper. William H. Robinson, et al., 80-101. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2020. Reproduced: P. 94, cat. no. 66

Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso. Vol. 1: Oeuvres de 1895 à 1906. Paris: Éditions 'Cahiers d'art,' 1932. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 135, xlvii, no. 303

20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903-1923. Exh. Cat. New York: Jacques Seligmann, 1937. Mentioned and reproduced: no. 4

Picasso Before 1907: Loan Exhibition for the Benefit of the Public Education Association. Exh. Cat. New York: Knoedler Galleries, 1947. Mentioned: no. 27

In Memoriam: Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958. Mentioned and reproduced: no. 28

Chessex, Jacques, and Francis Ponge. Dessins de Pablo Picasso: époques bleue et rose. Lausanne: Mermod, 1960. Mentioned: p. 74; Reproduced: no. 25

Seligman, Germain. Merchants of Art, 1880-1960: Eighty Years of Professional Collecting. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961. Mentioned and reproduced: plate 92

UCLA Art Council. Years of Ferment; The Birth of Twentieth Century Art 1886-1914. [Los Angeles]: [UCLA Art Council], 1965. Reproduced: P. 37, no. 42

Sutton, Denys and Paolo Lecaldano. The Complete Painting of Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1968. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 108, no. 256

The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969. Reproduced: p. 195 archive.org

Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family. Exh. Cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 91, 166, plate 39

The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. Reproduced: p. 241 archive.org

Palau i Fabre, Josep. Picasso: The Early Years 1881-1907. New York: Rizzoli, 1981. Mentioned: pp. 444-445, 880, no. 1231; Reproduced: p. 445

Small Paintings from Famous Collections. Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1981. Mentioned: p. 13

Daix, Pierre, Georges Boudaille, and Joan Rosselet. Picasso 1900-1906: catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint. Neuchâtel: Editions Ides et Calendes, 1988. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 294, no. XV.7

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. Vol. 1, 1881-1906. New York: Random House, 1991. Reproduced: p. 324

Turner, Evan H., ed. Object Lessons: Cleveland Creates an Art Museum. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991. Reproduced: p. 153

Rivero, Núria. Picasso, 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol. Exh. Cat. Barcelona: Museu Picasso, in association with Electa, 1992. Mentioned: p. 264

Geelhaar, Christian. Picasso: Wegbereiter und Förderer seines Aufstiegs 1899-1939. Zürich: Palladion, 1993. Mentioned: p. 26; Reproduced: p. 25

Mailer, Norman. Portrait of Picasso As a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. Reproduced: p. 203

DeGrazia, Diane, and Carter E. Foster. Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000. Mentioned: p. 7, pp. 228-229, 296; Reproduced: p. 229

DeGrazia, Diane. "The Evolution of a Collection: Drawings in Cleveland." Master Drawings 38, no. 3 (Fall 2000). Mentioned and reproduced: p. 255

Belloli, Lucy. "Los Paintings beneath Picasso's La Coiffure." Metropolitan Museum Journal 40 (2005): 151-161. Mentioned: p. 156; Reproduced: p. 158

Robinson, William H., Jordi Falgàs, Carmen Belen Lord, and Josefina Alix Trueba. Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí. [Cleveland, OH]: Cleveland Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006. Mentioned and reproduced: P. 240, fig. 3, no. 6.6

Bishop, Janet C., et al. The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Exh. Cat. San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2011. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 119, no. 294

Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue, 1885-1973: The Rose Period, 1905-1906. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 2012. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 201

Exhibition history

Picasso Before 1907: Loan Exhibition for the Benefit of the Public Education Association. Knoedler Galleries, New York (October 15 - November 8, 1947).

20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903 - 1923. Jacques Seligmann & Co., Inc., New York (November 1 - November 20, 1937).

Expressionism and Related Movements. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 26-February 28, 1939).

Years of Ferment: The Birth of Twentieth-century Art. Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA (January 24-March 7, 1965); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (March 28-May 16, 1965); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (July 14-August 22, 1965).

Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (December 19, 1970-March 1, 1971).

In Memoriam - Pablo Picasso, 1881 - 1973. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (April 10-May 7, 1973).

Small Paintings from Famous Collections. Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH (organizer) (April 4-June 7, 1981).

Object Lessons: Cleveland Creates an Art Museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 7-September 8, 1991).

Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 27-October 17, 2000); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (May 23-August 19, 2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX (October 14, 2001-January 6, 2002).

Monet to Dalí: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Seoul Art Center, South Korea (December 22, 2006-March 28, 2007); Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, South Korea (April 7-May 20, 2007).

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (February 21-June 3, 2012).

Impressionism to Modernism: The Keithley Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 11, 2022-January 8, 2023).

Cite this page

{{cite web|title=Head of a Boy|url=https://clevelandart.org/art/1958.43|author=Pablo Picasso|year=1905–6|access-date=28 May 2023|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

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Head of a Boy

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Pablo Picasso

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