Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) 
Self Portrait Facing Death
Pencil and crayon on paper, 30 June 1972
65.7 x 50.5 cm
Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

 

A short man with broad shoulders, a dash of hair across his forehead, black eyes round as a seal's. This is the image of the artist with whom we are all familiar. But what looks back at Picasso the mirror at the age of 90 going on 91 on the last day of June 1972? This self-portrait, crayon on paper, looks unlike anything he ever made. Mixing strength and vulnerability, power and powerlessness, this work both intensifies the history of the introspective self that began in the West around 1629 with Rembrandt, and it does what the Spanish temperament is proverbially tempted to do: it tries to stare down Death itself. 

An old friend, Pierre Daix, recalls seeing the work in an unfinished state. '[Picasso] held the drawing beside his face to show that the expression of fear was a contrivance; then he laid the sheet down without a word, leaving it to curl up again.' Three months later, on another visit to the studio, Daix noticed Picasso had deepened some of the harshly coloured lines: colours identical to those used in the painting done after the death of Julio González. 'He did not blink. I had the sudden impression that he was staring his own death in the face, like a good Spaniard.'

Death is the ultimate otherness, the absence of ourselves the world. Is Catalan machismo, in the form of the belligerent gaze, the only way that Picasso could set the hallucinatory omnipotence of the self against the tragic uncontrollability of fate?

The art critic Leo Steinberg comments: '[The drawing] projects the symbolic form of [Picasso's] dying [and] constitutes a rare icon of death in the first person.' The death prefigured by Picasso's Self-portrait occurred nine months later on 8 April 1973.