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Norman Mailer’s admiration for Pablo Picasso is well known; in 1995 he published a book, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography about the modernist master.

According to Amy Weiss-Meyer at The New Republic, Mailer would frequently take his two daughters to what he called “the Church of MOMA,” where they often would find themselves admiring this or that Picasso masterpiece. He also loved to draw, and he commonly sent friends cute little doodles, many of them of the human face. According to Mailer’s daughter Danielle, drawing was a respite from writing, which was a laborious and taxing undertaking. Drawing, on the other hand, was simply fun for him, an escape into pure delight. A new online platform called POBA is hosting a good many of Mailer’s doodles, many of which are reproduced below.

This passage from J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life mentions the doodles: “Most of his correspondents got Xerox copies of one of his drawings, doodles, and cartoons, and faces made of numbers, an idea he says he got from Picasso, who as a boy thought the number seven was an upside-down nose.”

As you can see, there’s a numerological facial portrait in the set, but Mailer opted to use a 1 for the nose, rather than a 7.

Parted Hair, 1985

Open Face, 1985

Ink on paper, 1974

Untitled 1, Year unknown

Untitled 2, 1985

Untitled 3, Year unknown

Untitled 4, 1974

Untitled 5, 1974

Untitled 6, Year unknown

Untitled 7, 1985

Untitled 8, 1985

Untitled 9, 1985

Untitled 10, 1973

Untitled 11, 1974

Untitled 12, 1973

Untitled 13, 1985

Untitled 14, 1985