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Lot Essay
Painted on 15 June 1953, Tête de femme depicts Picasso's partner Françoise Gilot shortly before their relationship was to come to an end in August. Picasso had met Françoise, an aspiring young painter, in May 1943. They began living together three years later and had a son, Claude, in 1947 and a daughter, Paloma, in 1949. In 1948 they moved to a villa called La Galloise, in the hills overlooking the town of Vallauris, where Picasso was making ceramics at Georges Ramié's Madoura pottery works. Vallauris provided them with a haven, something that Picasso was coming to value more and more, but serious strains had developed in their relationship. Françoise had confirmed her suspicions that Picasso had been having an affair and while he wanted a third child, she wanted to devote more time to her own painting, having recently had her first solo exhibition with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler at the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris in 1952.
In March 1953 Françoise went to Paris to work on sets and costumes for a ballet, taking the children with her and not returning until the summer. Previously, when Picasso and his family were apart, it was he who went travelling on business or to visit old friends. Alone in La Galloise, Picasso embarked on a series of bust length portraits and seated figures that clearly show Françoise's features, as if to conjure her presence. As happened with so many of his partners, his works effectively provide barometers indicating the state of his relationship. This is powerfully evoked in Tête de femme where Françoise's recognisable features - wide oval eyes, shapely nose, full lips and voluminous hair bun - are depicted with flattened planes and stark contrasts of form and colour. Picasso has employed bold, strong lines and an almost monochromatic palette to delineate her face, while the strong colours of her hair and blouse stand out starkly against the dark background. There is very little of her body and no extraneous detail to detract from Picasso's memory of her face, which, despite Françoise being still in her twenties, displays few signs of her youth and vitality. The psychological force behind these striking and powerful works were surely not lost on Françoise.
The later works in this series of depictions of Françoise are interspersed with a group of landscapes all depicting the same view from one of the windows at La Galloise. They were painted between 10 June and 1 July 1953, three of them on the same day as Tête de femme. Landscapes seldom feature in Picasso's work and this group prefigures the celebrated landscapes that he would paint from his later home in the South, the Villa la Californie. They can be seen as a foil to the depictions of Françoise; while the portraits are claustrophobic and internalised, a prescient indication of things to come, the landscape series looks beyond Picasso's mind and reflects a settled, domestic existence which has inspired in Picasso a rare sense of place and creativity.
In March 1953 Françoise went to Paris to work on sets and costumes for a ballet, taking the children with her and not returning until the summer. Previously, when Picasso and his family were apart, it was he who went travelling on business or to visit old friends. Alone in La Galloise, Picasso embarked on a series of bust length portraits and seated figures that clearly show Françoise's features, as if to conjure her presence. As happened with so many of his partners, his works effectively provide barometers indicating the state of his relationship. This is powerfully evoked in Tête de femme where Françoise's recognisable features - wide oval eyes, shapely nose, full lips and voluminous hair bun - are depicted with flattened planes and stark contrasts of form and colour. Picasso has employed bold, strong lines and an almost monochromatic palette to delineate her face, while the strong colours of her hair and blouse stand out starkly against the dark background. There is very little of her body and no extraneous detail to detract from Picasso's memory of her face, which, despite Françoise being still in her twenties, displays few signs of her youth and vitality. The psychological force behind these striking and powerful works were surely not lost on Françoise.
The later works in this series of depictions of Françoise are interspersed with a group of landscapes all depicting the same view from one of the windows at La Galloise. They were painted between 10 June and 1 July 1953, three of them on the same day as Tête de femme. Landscapes seldom feature in Picasso's work and this group prefigures the celebrated landscapes that he would paint from his later home in the South, the Villa la Californie. They can be seen as a foil to the depictions of Françoise; while the portraits are claustrophobic and internalised, a prescient indication of things to come, the landscape series looks beyond Picasso's mind and reflects a settled, domestic existence which has inspired in Picasso a rare sense of place and creativity.