Executed in 1907, Tête de femme is a striking portrait in which Picasso explores a greater simplification of line and color through the stylistic influence of Iberian, African and Oceanic art. During this period Picasso experimented with an increasingly abstracted form, and Tête de femme marks an important step towards the genesis of his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted later that same year. The present work was almost certainly inspired by his paramour Fernande Olivier, as Josep Palau i Fabre suggests in his 1980 publication (op. cit.). Olivier was Picasso’s lover and muse during the time this work was executed, and she often wore her hair in the loose bun that is so effortlessly captured in Tête de femme. Her features inspired a number of Picasso’s works before the pair separated in 1912 (see figs. 1 & 2).

Executed during a period of heightened creativity, Tête de femme exudes a renewed sense of artistic vigor following a trip Picasso and Olivier made the previous year to the small town of Gósol in the Pyrenees. It was during the months spent in Gósol that Picasso escaped the financial strain imposed by living in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre and fully devoted himself to his artistic efforts. As a result of this increased sense of freedom, Picasso and Olivier experienced their greatest period of happiness together and Olivier became a defining presence in Picasso’s work. This newfound harmony in turn sparked a renewed sense of creativity in the artist. One that continued to drive him long after he returned to Paris and can be seen in the energetic brushstrokes of Tête de femme. The simplified, sweeping arabesques carry a depth of expression exemplified by the sparing, but complementary, use of color. Demonstrating Picasso’s adept draughtsmanship, the brushstrokes assert the primacy of line inherent throughout the artist’s oeuvre. In many of his works preceding Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso employed bold gestural strokes, leaving much of the surrounding space untouched (see figs. 3 & 4). In Tête de femme the result is a beautifully crisp composition in which the white background heightens the strength of line. Intertwining blue with a rusty ochre, the color palette of Tête de femme anticipates that of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, while evoking Picasso’s celebrated Blue and Rose periods, both of which had recently brought the artist some financial relief following a significant purchase by the dealer Ambrose Vollard. In the present work, Picasso uses this ochre to intensify the figure’s eyes and part of her face and neck. Several brushstrokes lifting upwards into the background suggest an evocation of space and infuse an earthy warmth juxtaposing the cool blue tones.

In the early years of the twentieth century there was a burgeoning desire to explore non-Western art forms. Masks originating from Oceania, Africa and the Iberian Peninsula created a stir among the avant-garde due to their non-representational approach to the human form. A visit to the Ethnographical Museum at the Trocadero in Paris in 1907 was to have a profound impact upon Picasso, who marveled at the aesthetic quality of these artifacts: “The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things” (quoted in A. Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, New York, 1994, pp. 10-11). It is in the oval eyes, angular cheekbones and elongated nose of Tête de femme that the stylistic influence of these objects make themselves known. Pierre Daix has elaborated upon the motives that drove Picasso during these years: “Picasso did not try to make himself into a primitive after the fashion of Gauguin. He wanted rather—with the help of primitive vision—to cleanse art of what he called tricks, of the stale and paralyzing conventions which were merely sham compared to the profound truths of painting. He established that art, at its origins, was capable of an expressive force so powerful that even the great classic centuries might be said to have weakened rather than strengthened it” (P. Daix, Picasso, Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 62). Challenging preconceived notions of figural representation, Tête de femme is a compelling depiction of Picasso’s first great muse and a fascinating insight into the development of ideas that would lead the artist first to the monumental Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and then into his great Cubist experiments of the years that followed.