Tête de Femme was probably painted just after Metzinger completed his military service. It belongs to a whole series of fine cubist representations of fashionable women begun in 1912. Joann Moser discusses the importance of these paintings at length in her introduction to the Jean Metzinger in Retrospect exhibition catalogue: "Metzinger's predilection for creating numerous variations on a theme was already apparent ... The series of women with fashionable accessories, such as a fan, a feather, a striking piece of jewelry, a lace decoration, a cigarette, suggests his continuing involvement with the fashionable life of Paris while he was exploring the highly intellectual pseudo-scientific principles of composition and abstraction ... [If] one assumes that colour was becoming more important for Metzinger ... he was using it in a progressively bolder manner ... This assumption would also lead one to observe that patterning, in the background as well as on the figure itself, becomes more important in the later works, and that there is greater abstraction of form and flattening of space. This line of development appears to be confirmed by Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote in 1913: 'His art, always more and more abstract, but always charming, raises and attempts to solve the most difficult and unforseen problems of aesthetics'." (Exhibition catlague, Iowa City, 1985-86, p. 206.)