Tête de femme (Fernande)

An icon of twentieth-century art, Pablo Picasso’s Tête de femme (Fernande) ranks among the artist’s most important works. Executed in clay in 1909 following an intensely creative summer that the artist had spent with his first great love, muse, and subject of the sculpture, Fernande Olivier, Tête de femme marks a decisive turning point in the artist’s revolutionary movement, Cubism, as he synthesized his intense explorations into the nature of pictorial representation into three-dimensional form. Tête de femme stands both as the conclusion of this period of revelatory discovery and marks the beginning of a new direction of exploration in Picasso’s career. With this work he demonstrated that sculpture no longer needed to be modeled or carved as a solid object, but could be cut apart to more fully incorporate the intangible qualities of light and space. This concept opened the door to a host of new possibilities not just in the medium of sculpture, but of art itself.
Tête de femme was executed soon after Picasso returned to Paris after a period of exciting artistic production in Spain over the course of four months in the summer of 1909. The artist and Fernande had traveled to the rural, hilltop Catalonian village of Horta de Ebro (today known as Horta de Sant Joan), arriving there in early June. An artists’ model who had fled to Paris to escape her husband, Amélie Lang, as she was born, had been the artist’s companion since 1905. Described by André Salmon as “La belle Fernande,” she played a central role in the development of Picasso’s work. Her image was translated into the various stylistic pursuits Picasso explored in these critical years: in 1906 she appeared as if an archaic Greek statue, before her body morphed into the Iberian-inspired, statuesque forms of 1907.
The summer that Picasso spent in Horta was one of the most important trips of his life. Throughout the spring of this year, Picasso and his cubist partner, Georges Braque had made a number of radical pictorial leaps, the most important of which was the deconstruction of the pictorial illusion of mass. Far removed from Picasso’s bohemian life in Paris, Horta provided a crucible for him to explore this concept without distraction, resulting in what William Rubin has described as “the most crucial and productive vacation of his career. There in the pellucid Mediterranean light of his native Spain, he distilled from the material he had been exploring during the previous two years his first fully defined statement of Analytic Cubism” (Picasso in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, p. 56).
During his stay in Horta, Picasso painted eight portraits of Fernande (Zervos, vol. 2*, nos. 165, 167, 169-170, 172, 174; vol. 6, no. 1071; vol. 24, no. 419), as well as a number of drawings (see J. Weiss, The Cubist Portraits of Fernande OIivier, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2003, p. 8). Inspired by the mountainous, rugged terrain of Horta, Picasso rendered his melancholic muse—Fernande was unwell for much of their trip—with a new artistic idiom. In contrast to the mask-like visages and rigid bodies of his figures of the previous year, the rounded forms of Fernande’s head and body, as well as her setting, are shattered, splintered into shard-like, multipartite arrangements.
Instead of attaining a sense of volume using tonal modeling, Picasso instead presented the figure as if it was made up of angular, interlocking, blade-like forms. In this way, he had found a new means of conveying a sense of three-dimensionality and the tangible experience of objects in paint upon the canvas. “As the series of Fernandes progresses, Picasso switches backwards and forwards between long shots and close-ups,” John Richardson described. “He bifurcates and crenellates Fernande’s forehead like the spurs of the peak. And just as he merges the faceted head with the faceted mountain, he merges the faceted mountain with the faceted sky. As a result, sky, mountain, drapery, woman, cohere into a single organism” (A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 133).
Picasso and Fernande returned to Paris in September 1909. At this point, they moved from the Bateau Lavoir into a new studio at 11 Boulevard de Clichy. Instead of turning in a different artistic direction as he often did on his return from a period spent away from the city, Picasso plunged headlong into the sculptural concerns that he had hit upon in his painting and drawing, eager to convert these into clay. In late September or early October, he borrowed the studio of his close friend, the Catalan sculptor, Manolo (Manuel Hugué) so that he could model the Tête de femme. “As soon as he was back in Montmartre… he modeled this head,” Richardson wrote. “After casting it in plaster, Picasso sliced away at the facets to make them diamond sharp. The head bears out a claim he made some years later that there were enough specifications in cubist paintings for an exact three-dimensional equivalent to be made” (ibid., p. 139).
Tête de femme attests to the importance of sculpture in the early development of Cubism and indeed to Picasso’s career as a whole. With their cubist work of this time, both Picasso and Braque confronted the centuries-old problem of conveying three-dimensional objects upon a two-dimensional surface. They initially approached this contradiction by conveying multiple viewpoints in a single composition, rendering the experience of observing the object as it exists in space. This was in many ways a sculptural approach and the artists used this to solve this initial painterly quandary. “It is only necessary to cut them out,” Picasso later described his Analytic cubist compositions to his friend and fellow sculptor Julio González, “the colors are the only indications of different perspectives, of planes inclined from one side or the other—then assemble them according to the indications given by the color, in order to find oneself in the presence of a ‘Sculpture’” (quoted in M. McCully, Picasso: Sculptor Painter, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1994, p. 219).
With Tête de femme, Picasso brought to a climax the formal discoveries he had made over the preceding months. It is unlikely that Fernande sat for any of the portraits—painted or sculpted—that Picasso made of her at this time—her presence was all he needed to convert her image into artistic form. “The model for the sculpture was, in effect, the Olivier created by the paintings of the summer and not the flesh-and-blood woman with whom Picasso shared his life,” Ann Temkin and Anne Umland have written (Picasso Sculpture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015, p. 51).
Taking the distinctive features of Fernande—her wide, deep-set almond-shaped eyes, broad neck, and perhaps most importantly, her hair styled into a great wave atop her head—in this work Picasso transformed her into a striking, monumental construction of both geometric and organic faceted forms. The artist captured Fernande with her head tilted slightly downwards, as if in the midst of turning to the side. As a result, her neck is rendered in a pyramidal form, the activated musculature conveyed with dynamic ridges that thrust upward towards her head. The back of Fernande’s swoop of hair is rendered with softer, teardrop, or petal-shaped forms that ascend like waves, undulating forwards towards the more angular construction of her face. An assortment of ridges and recessions, facets and hollows, constructs Fernande’s visage. Everything from her eyes, their sockets and brows, as well as her hair line and the entire shape of her face take an arch-like form, imbuing this radical work with a rhythmic dynamism.
The monumentality of Tête de femme was not always Picasso’s initial plan. He had initially thought about rendering Fernande’s head with wire. As he later explained to Roland Penrose, “I thought that the curves you see on the surface should continue into the interior,” he explained. “I had the idea of doing them in wire... [but] it was too intellectual, too much like painting” (quoted in R. Penrose, The Sculpture of Picasso, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967, p. 19). While he ultimately decided to use clay, thereby maintaining the materiality and solidity of the object, he broke down its surface, faceting it into the same geometric planes that he had employed in his painting. In so doing, he incorporated light, movement, and negative space into the work, harnessing these intangible aspects as an integral part of the construction.
Picasso may have looked to two past sources as inspiration for his radical reconstruction of the human form. Tête de femme has been described as resembling ecorchés, flayed figure sculptures used by artists—Cezanne owned one such work—to study musculature under the skin. In addition, Picasso may have seen the work of sixteenth-century artist, Andreas Vesalius, who pioneered the study of the human anatomy. Picasso’s friend, the poet, Guillaume Apollinaire supposedly owned a copy of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, which was filled with highly detailed woodcuts illustrating the various components of the human body—in stages the musculature, internal organs, and skeleton. “Vesalius has re-entered the picture,” John Richardson wrote of the artist’s depictions of Fernande in 1909. “With his help Picasso penetrates beneath the skin, not because of any special interest in anatomical technicalities but because he wants to reconcile not just back and front but inside and outside” (op. cit., 2009, p. 133). This idea of going beyond the external appearance of the figure was an aspect Apollinaire also noted at the time. “And besides,” he wrote of Picasso in 1913, “anatomy, for example, really no longer existed in art; it had to be reinvented, and everyone had to perform his own assassination with the methodical skill of a great surgeon” (quoted in L.C. Breunig, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918 by Guillaume Apollinaire, London, 1972, p. 280).
The dealer Ambroise Vollard bought the clay Tête de femme from Picasso in 1910, and began casting it in bronze the same year. Before the sculpture was cast in bronze, Picasso likely attended the foundry himself to work on the plaster model. He later recalled to Douglas Cooper and John Richardson that he had used a knife to sharpen the facets on the front of the neck of the plaster model that had been taken from the clay (which was itself necessarily destroyed in the process), increasing the angular quality of the head (V. Fletcher, “Process and Technique in Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande),” in exh. cat., op. cit., 2003, p. 175). While the initial clay version had a distinctly modeled aspect, including passages where the artist’s fingerprints are visible, by 1910, his Cubism had developed again to become increasingly geometric, constructed with linear grids that border on abstraction. This aesthetic likely led him to heighten the angular forms of his Tête de femme.
Vollard, as Valerie Fletcher has detailed, did not produce a specific edition, nor did he number each successive cast. Additionally, they do not have foundry marks. Rather, he requested casts as he required them until his death in 1939. The plaster created at the time of the first casting in 1910 is now on long term loan to the Tate Modern, London. A second plaster, now housed in the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, was cast from a mould of the Tate plaster no earlier than 1960 (see R. Leonardi, “Picasso’s Sculpture Head of a Woman (Fernande) 1909: A Collaborative Technical Study” in Colloque Picasso Sculptures, 25 March 2016, p. 3). The present cast was acquired by the Belgian perfume magnate and legendary art collector, René Gaffé and his wife, Jeanne. It remained in the Gaffé’s collection until Jeanne’s death in 2001, at which point it was sold in a record-breaking auction at Christie’s in the same year.
There are approximately twenty known casts of Picasso’s Tête de femme (Fernande), the majority of which are in public institutions including the Musée national Picasso, Paris; National Gallery, Prague; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Portland Art Museum, Oregon. In 1960, Picasso authorized Heinz Berggruen to cast a further edition of 9; unlike the earlier edition, these were numbered and stamped with the Valsuani foundry mark. Five of these nine later casts are located in public institutions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena; Stiftung Kulturbesitz, Berlin and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.