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Lot Essay
In March 1963 Picasso delved into the theme that would preoccupy him for the ten years of life remaining to him, the subject of the artist and his model, which in a larger sense reflected the complex web of physical and emotional relationships between men and women. In the increasing seclusion of his later years, Picasso became reliant on the presence of his wife Jacqueline to provide the day-to-day inspiration for his mercuric imagination. She appears at every turn in his late work. "All of the women of these years are Jacqueline. The image of the woman he loves is a model imprinted deep within, and it emerges every time he paints a woman." (M.-L. Bernadac, in Late Picasso, exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 78). The artist and model pictures are essentially a dialogue between male and female, the lover and his beloved, in which the intimate and domestic day-to-day world of the artist has been elevated to a realm that is timeless and universal.
The artist and model pictures are of course dual-figure compositions, but there are as many individual portraits of women and men, into which Picasso projected aspects of his wife and himself. His male portraits are the most diverse in character, insofar as Picasso used them to describe the manifold aspects of his own complex personality, and to recall events from his past. He created a virtual gallery of guises in which he appears alternately youthful or senescent, impassioned or wise. The female portraits, on the other hand, such as the especially colorful picture seen here, normally depict a more stable and constant persona, one which consistently embodied all of the blessings that Jacqueline provided in Picasso's life, in which she was wife, protectress, odalisque and muse.
The present Tête de femme depicts Jacqueline with her shoulder-length black hair. It was the last of seven portraits that Picasso painted on 5 December 1964 (Zervos, vol. 24, nos. 299-303, 306 and 305 in order of execution). Numbers 'I' through 'V' in this sequence depict men with stubbly beards, whose features Picasso executed with zigzag slashes of color. These male heads are seen close up and are tightly cropped, resulting in flattened compositions. The artist employed a rounder and less aggressively masculine graphism in number 'VI', a head of a young boy wearing a striped jersey. In the present painting, numbered 'VII' in the sequence, his stylization of the face is even more gentle and softly rounded, in an appropriately feminine manner for his comely subject.
Picasso has rendered Jacqueline in this Portrait de femme in brilliant Matissean, Fauve-like colors, playing on the contrasts of red and green, yellow and violet. Indeed, this painting may reflect Picasso's ongoing dialogue with the memory of Matisse, his long-time friend and rival, who died in 1954. Picasso's many late portraits of bearded men clad in a striped fisherman's jersey recall Matisse's well-known Fauve Auto-portrait, 1906 (coll. Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen), in which Matisse painted himself wearing a striped vest. This Portrait de femme may likewise suggest a distant kinship, across a divide of nearly six decades, with Matisse's La raie verte, his famous portrait of his wife Amélie (fig. 1).
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Portrait de Madame Matisse: La raie verte, 1905. Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen.
The artist and model pictures are of course dual-figure compositions, but there are as many individual portraits of women and men, into which Picasso projected aspects of his wife and himself. His male portraits are the most diverse in character, insofar as Picasso used them to describe the manifold aspects of his own complex personality, and to recall events from his past. He created a virtual gallery of guises in which he appears alternately youthful or senescent, impassioned or wise. The female portraits, on the other hand, such as the especially colorful picture seen here, normally depict a more stable and constant persona, one which consistently embodied all of the blessings that Jacqueline provided in Picasso's life, in which she was wife, protectress, odalisque and muse.
The present Tête de femme depicts Jacqueline with her shoulder-length black hair. It was the last of seven portraits that Picasso painted on 5 December 1964 (Zervos, vol. 24, nos. 299-303, 306 and 305 in order of execution). Numbers 'I' through 'V' in this sequence depict men with stubbly beards, whose features Picasso executed with zigzag slashes of color. These male heads are seen close up and are tightly cropped, resulting in flattened compositions. The artist employed a rounder and less aggressively masculine graphism in number 'VI', a head of a young boy wearing a striped jersey. In the present painting, numbered 'VII' in the sequence, his stylization of the face is even more gentle and softly rounded, in an appropriately feminine manner for his comely subject.
Picasso has rendered Jacqueline in this Portrait de femme in brilliant Matissean, Fauve-like colors, playing on the contrasts of red and green, yellow and violet. Indeed, this painting may reflect Picasso's ongoing dialogue with the memory of Matisse, his long-time friend and rival, who died in 1954. Picasso's many late portraits of bearded men clad in a striped fisherman's jersey recall Matisse's well-known Fauve Auto-portrait, 1906 (coll. Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen), in which Matisse painted himself wearing a striped vest. This Portrait de femme may likewise suggest a distant kinship, across a divide of nearly six decades, with Matisse's La raie verte, his famous portrait of his wife Amélie (fig. 1).
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Portrait de Madame Matisse: La raie verte, 1905. Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen.