Pablo Picasso - TÊTE DE FEMME

 

Pablo Picasso

1881 - 1973

TÊTE DE FEMME

Pencil on a card cut-out
18 by 12 1/8 in.
46 by 31 cm
Executed in 1961

In the last seventeen years of his life, Picasso’s sole model was his beloved wife, Jacqueline Roque. The couple famously met when Jacqueline was employed as a sales woman at the Madoura ceramic studio in Vallauris in 1952. As described by Barbara Rose, “he was seventy; she was twenty five. Old enough to be her grandfather, Picasso fell madly in love with the young woman and pursued her until she finally succumbed to his ardor. With her exotic almond-green eyes, shiny dark hair, olive complexion, aquiline nose, and voluptuous body, the young Jacqueline was nothing less than the incarnation of Picasso’s fantasies” (Barbara Rose, quoted in Picasso & Jacqueline, The Evolution of Style (exhibition catalogue), New York, 2014-15, p. 24).

The manifestation of his perfect mate and his ultimate muse lead to a period of unrivaled creativity during which time Picasso experimented with ceramics, steel, and prints and reworked Old Master paintings. Obsessed with capturing Jacqueline’s likeness, Picasso did more than four hundred portraits of her over the course of their relationship, from genre oils and woodcuts to this extraordinary paper cut. A testament to his love of her almond eyes and her angular face, this Cubist sculpture captures the playfulness and ease Picasso was actively experiencing with Jacqueline at the time of its creation.

Formally analagous to the artist’s sheet metal compositions which he was working upon simultaneously, the cut outs share with their metal counterparts a challenging and inquisitive spirit. As elucidated by Werner Spies, this is no more apparent than in the sculptural renderings of Jacqueline herself, “these sheet-metal sculptures elude simultaneous perception. This is due to the fact that at any given moment, we are confronted with a planar image, and cannot-as with a modeled sculpture-anticipate the course of the eye will peacefully follow. Most complicate and perplexing are the sheet-metal heads. In these sculptures, measurable, logically recognizable elements are connected in such a way to bring vision into an irrational situation. Something dramatic opens up in this shift of the subject: a new concept of time dominates these sculptures, an interruption of the following, unlimited open-ended temporal continuum. Time is revealed both perceptually and existentially. This comes to expression not at least in all in the many busts of Jacqueline, in which an expression is apprehended and immediately effaced. This alteration of attitude calls into questions even the simple statement of a face” (Werner Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, Stuttgart, 2000, p. 286).

An exceedingly rare three-dimensional piece, this work was formerly in the personal collection of Marina Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter.