Pablo Picasso

Jacob Goldschmidt, New York

Heinz Berggruen, Paris

Perls Galleries, New York

PaceWildenstein, New York

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 6, Paris, 1954, no. 1446, illustrated (titled Peinture and with the measurements 22 by 18 cm)

The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, Neoclassicism II, 1922-1924, San Francisco, 1996, no. 23-076, illustrated p. 138 (titled Tête de femme de profil and with the measurements 22 by 18 cm)

Original canvas. There are no retouches visible under ultra-violet light. This work is in excellent condition.
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Picasso had a long-standing admiration for the art of antiquity, examples of which were readily available for him to see at the Louvre.  Paintings and drawings throughout his career bore the influence of Greco-Roman mythology, and this picture is a quotation of that particular aesthetic.  According to Jean Clair, the director of the Musée Picasso in Paris, "Picasso's neo-classicism, or rather his Hellenism or even his Athenianism, did not date from the 1920s and his return from Italy. It was a recurring theme running through his entire work, from the first childhood drawings of academic models of Greek statuary, through the tall, imposing, upright nudes in his study for the Saltimbanques, the work that inspired Rilke in 1905, to The Pipes of Pan.  In Catalonia it was called Nouventismo, in Italy Novecentismo.  Young painters, from Maillol to Picasso, eagerly sought to converge in a common culture, the culture of the Mediterranean, cradle of western civilization, from Ancient Greece to its modern renaissance" (Jean Clair, "Picasso and Cronos," in Picasso and Greece (exhibition catalogue), Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Andros, 2004, p. 28).