Descripción
He used kaolin decorated with slips and covered with enamel. The colours (ivory, yellow, blue, brown and matt black) were applied with a brush. 100 numbered copies were produced.
Another run of this poster was made for the same exhibition but in a larger format, in which the ceramic piece appears in colour on a brown background.
Picasso made four versions of the ceramic reproduced in the poster, which can be placed in pairs. Regarding the colouring, Picasso simply kept the white of the ceramic in one of each pair and, in the others, used a similar colour, ivory, yellow, blue and black, although, in the one reproduced in the poster, he added brown and the black is a matt black. The difference in the modelling of the eyes comes from their size and where they are placed. In ‘Rostro de caballero’, the ceramic that is reproduced in the two posters, the master drew the face of old age, of sadness, of the anguish that Picasso felt with the inexorable loss of faculties, with the destructive passage of time. Camilo José Cela tells us that Picasso once told him: “Don’t fool yourself, Camilo José, when you are ‘young’, you are ‘young’ for life.” The decrepit appearance of the character becomes heartbreaking as a result of the relief applied to certain features, turning him into a real ‘monster’.
