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Lot Essay
Femme nue se coiffant dates from 1906, as Pablo Picasso approached the rich and fertile end of his Rose Period and began to explore the increasingly sculptural quality that would lead to his revolutionary Les demoiselles d'Avignon the following year, and thence to Cubism. However, Femme nue se coiffant reveals the extent to which a tender, poetic atmosphere remained central to the Rose Period, even while he explored the three-dimensionality of his subjects in a new manner. Gone here is the waif-like emaciation of the earlier Blue Period, a change that has been ascribed in part to the more curvaceous appearance of Fernande Olivier, his lover during this period and the Muse whose features played such an important role in the birth of Cubism. Here, the female figure, which clearly resembles Picasso's likenesses of Fernande, is shown in an hieratic pose, adjusting her hair. This was a motif to which he returned in a range of works during the course of 1906, and which allows a comparison that reveals the way that his art developed during that time.
Picasso appears to have been inspired to treat the subject of women adjusting their hair in part through the influence of Ingres' Le bain turc, which had only recently been rediscovered at this time. Picasso had been struck in part by the sculptural nature of Ingres' figures, and indeed Femme nue se coiffant recalls other works by the French painter such as La sourcei and the Venus Anadyomene. The subject of the woman adjusting another woman's hair appeared again in Picasso's La toilette of 1906, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which showed two women, one adjusting the hair of the other.
Gradually, in part perhaps through the influence of the Dutch women he had seen the previous year in Schoorl and in part through observation of Fernande, he introduced an increasingly sculptural quality to these pictures, a development that reflected his own involvement with the plastic arts during this period. He had worked with clay before, and while in Gósol during the Summer of 1906 also turned to wood-carving. While the naturalism of Femme nue se coiffant may also invoke the work of Edgar Degas, who also showed women adjusting their hair in many of his pastels, one of the other influences at the time appears to have been the recently-deceased Paul Gauguin. The legendary artist's own stoneware ceramic figure, Oviri, now in the Musée d'Orsay, appears to have filtered into Picasso's own works, not least in a bronze of Fernande with a hand to her own locks which likewise appears related to Femme nue se coiffant. Picasso was struck by Gauguin's three-dimensional works, as well as by the collection of ancient Iberian sculptures that had been recently acquired by the Louvre at the time. Picasso's Spanish pride appears in part to have influenced him in this, in the directness of expression that those early works achieved, and he sought to echo it, and its arcane character, in his own pictures and sculptures. That he has managed this in Femme nue se coiffant with such a sense of delicacy implies that the work was created during the first three quarters of the year, before the sculptural quality reached a new extreme.
Picasso appears to have been inspired to treat the subject of women adjusting their hair in part through the influence of Ingres' Le bain turc, which had only recently been rediscovered at this time. Picasso had been struck in part by the sculptural nature of Ingres' figures, and indeed Femme nue se coiffant recalls other works by the French painter such as La sourcei and the Venus Anadyomene. The subject of the woman adjusting another woman's hair appeared again in Picasso's La toilette of 1906, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which showed two women, one adjusting the hair of the other.
Gradually, in part perhaps through the influence of the Dutch women he had seen the previous year in Schoorl and in part through observation of Fernande, he introduced an increasingly sculptural quality to these pictures, a development that reflected his own involvement with the plastic arts during this period. He had worked with clay before, and while in Gósol during the Summer of 1906 also turned to wood-carving. While the naturalism of Femme nue se coiffant may also invoke the work of Edgar Degas, who also showed women adjusting their hair in many of his pastels, one of the other influences at the time appears to have been the recently-deceased Paul Gauguin. The legendary artist's own stoneware ceramic figure, Oviri, now in the Musée d'Orsay, appears to have filtered into Picasso's own works, not least in a bronze of Fernande with a hand to her own locks which likewise appears related to Femme nue se coiffant. Picasso was struck by Gauguin's three-dimensional works, as well as by the collection of ancient Iberian sculptures that had been recently acquired by the Louvre at the time. Picasso's Spanish pride appears in part to have influenced him in this, in the directness of expression that those early works achieved, and he sought to echo it, and its arcane character, in his own pictures and sculptures. That he has managed this in Femme nue se coiffant with such a sense of delicacy implies that the work was created during the first three quarters of the year, before the sculptural quality reached a new extreme.