Lot Essay
The years pre-dating Picasso's completion of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is relatively difficult to chart in terms of any particular stylistic development. Instead between 1905 and 1907 Picasso came under a great number of influences, both artistic and personal, which fused to produce Les Demoiselles. Tête de Femme shares and reveals many of these influences, for this reason it was described in the recent Max Jacob et Picasso exhibition in Paris as a preparatory study for Les Demoiselles.
In 1906 the Louvre acquired a group of archaic Iberian sculptures which had been recently excavated from sites in Southern Spain. Impressed by their strong line and dense proportions Picasso began to draw and paint in a more volumetric and sculptural fashion. Roland Penrose records, "In the essential elements of this art he found the necessary support to transgress academic prohibitions, to exceed established measures, and to put aesthetic laws in question". (R. Penrose, Picasso, Paris, 1991, p. 54).
Tête de Femme also clearly shows the influence of Picasso's soujourn in Gosol. In 1906 Picasso spent ten weeks in the village in the Spanish Pyrenees with Fernande Olivier. The bare reddish-brown earth of Gosol saturate all the works of this period and here surface in the strong deep red shading of Tête de Femme.
At this time Fernande was very much the artist's muse. In comparing Nu Couchant (Fernande) in the Cleveland Museum to the present gouache it is tempting to suggest that Fernande's could be the feline, almond eyes and strong cheekbones of Tête de Femme. This is only one of many striking likenesses to Fernande which appear in works of this period. As Pierre Daix comments "In Fernande we can see the first of Picasso's great dialogues with his models, his women-models. Again and again his art is fertilized by his love for the model. It is not only a dialogue between himself and the model, or between himself and the painting, it is also a dialogue between himself and what he is learning." (P. Daix & G. Boudaille, Picasso - The Blue and Rose Periods, London, 1966, p. 94).
If one sees Picasso's work between 1906 and 1907 as very much a continuum towards the completion of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon there are several works relating very directly to Tête de Femme which chart Picasso's progress to the fuller abstraction of the final painting. The Buste de Femme of 1907 (Z.II,*31), for example, now in the Hermitage in Leningrad (fig. 1), clearly illustrates how Picasso was consistently developing the reduction of the human form into pure outlines and sharp angles. In a later Torse de Femme of 1907-08 (Z.II,**64) in the Narodní Gallery, Prague, the progression towards cubistic principles becomes more obvious: the forms have become even clearer and the plastic modelling sharper and more symmetrical.
In 1906 the Louvre acquired a group of archaic Iberian sculptures which had been recently excavated from sites in Southern Spain. Impressed by their strong line and dense proportions Picasso began to draw and paint in a more volumetric and sculptural fashion. Roland Penrose records, "In the essential elements of this art he found the necessary support to transgress academic prohibitions, to exceed established measures, and to put aesthetic laws in question". (R. Penrose, Picasso, Paris, 1991, p. 54).
Tête de Femme also clearly shows the influence of Picasso's soujourn in Gosol. In 1906 Picasso spent ten weeks in the village in the Spanish Pyrenees with Fernande Olivier. The bare reddish-brown earth of Gosol saturate all the works of this period and here surface in the strong deep red shading of Tête de Femme.
At this time Fernande was very much the artist's muse. In comparing Nu Couchant (Fernande) in the Cleveland Museum to the present gouache it is tempting to suggest that Fernande's could be the feline, almond eyes and strong cheekbones of Tête de Femme. This is only one of many striking likenesses to Fernande which appear in works of this period. As Pierre Daix comments "In Fernande we can see the first of Picasso's great dialogues with his models, his women-models. Again and again his art is fertilized by his love for the model. It is not only a dialogue between himself and the model, or between himself and the painting, it is also a dialogue between himself and what he is learning." (P. Daix & G. Boudaille, Picasso - The Blue and Rose Periods, London, 1966, p. 94).
If one sees Picasso's work between 1906 and 1907 as very much a continuum towards the completion of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon there are several works relating very directly to Tête de Femme which chart Picasso's progress to the fuller abstraction of the final painting. The Buste de Femme of 1907 (Z.II,*31), for example, now in the Hermitage in Leningrad (fig. 1), clearly illustrates how Picasso was consistently developing the reduction of the human form into pure outlines and sharp angles. In a later Torse de Femme of 1907-08 (Z.II,**64) in the Narodní Gallery, Prague, the progression towards cubistic principles becomes more obvious: the forms have become even clearer and the plastic modelling sharper and more symmetrical.