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Lot Essay
Picasso painted Tête de femme au chapeau on 1 June 1965, in the midst of an exceptionally productive period. During the last three months of 1964, he generated a torrent of paintings on a theme that had preoccupied him since the previous year: the artist and his model, encountering one another across the barrier of the canvas. As the winter wore on, he removed the painter from the scene and focused exclusively on the object of his gaze, the model's nude body filling the expanse of the canvas or her head and shoulders viewed close-up. In mid-March, Picasso brought the two protagonists together again in the hallowed space of the studio. Just a month later, however, spring came to his home at Mougins, and he decided to move the duo outdoors. As in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (both Manet's original and Picasso's long suite of variants from 1959-1962), the fictional painter now takes a respite from his artistic labors to enjoy his model's company, lounging beside her in the grass or plying her with watermelon. In the present painting, the model has donned a straw sunhat with a wide, floppy brim that casts much of her face in shadow. This is the final canvas in a sequence of five that Picasso painted over the course of three days, all of which feature the same jaunty summer chapeau (Zervos, vol. 25, nos. 140-143, 148; Christie's, New York, 6 November 2008, lot 71).
Throughout this prodigious outpouring of work, the model is Jacqueline Roque, the last great love of Picasso's life; she was fond of gardening at Mougins and may well have worn a straw hat like the one seen here to shield her face from the southern sun. Picasso met Jacqueline at Vallauris in 1952, just as his relationship with Franoise Gilot was beginning to unravel. They took up residence together two years later and married in 1961, a few months shy of the artist's eightieth birthday. Although Jacqueline never posed for Picasso, her image permeates the artist's late work; she becomes the ultimate and universal woman, the object of the artist's obsessive attention. Picasso needed only the stimulation of Jacqueline's proximity, and paintings sprang forth, forming a veritable paean to the strength of his feelings for her: "Jacqueline possesses to an unimaginable degree the gift of turning into painting," he explained to Hélène Parmelin (quoted in Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 58).
Picasso had been fond of painting woman in hats since his early years, and especially during the 1930s, when he shared the Surrealists' fascination with women's headwear as a revealing manifestation of their inner lives. In the present painting, the hat is as much a focal point of the composition as Jacqueline herself, its golden hue standing out against the vivid blue ground. When Picasso painted this canvas, he may have been thinking of Peasant Woman in a Wheatfield by his lifelong idol Van Gogh ("the greatest of them all," he proclaimed), in which the sitter wears a very similar woven bonnet (de la Faille, no. 774; for quote, see ibid., p. 32). The same type of hat, of course, can also be an attribute of the artist himself. Van Gogh donned it in several self-portraits to express his deep kinship with peasants and laborers, and Picasso's painter wears it in a half-dozen artist-and-model scenes from the summer of 1963 and intermittently thereafter. By transferring the hat to Jacqueline in the present painting, Picasso suggests that the artist and his model have become one, a process of imaginative identification that reaches its zenith in canvases that show the bare-breasted model at the easel, brush in hand (e.g. Zervos, vol. 25, no. 24, from earlier in 1965).
The straw hat of Van Gogh, moreover, is no incidental motif, but rather an emblem of the aging Picasso's profound identification with the Dutch master, whom he called his patron saint. John Richardson has written, "Picasso wanted to galvanize his paint surface...with some of the Dutchman's Dionysian fervor. It worked. The surface of the late paintings has a freedom, a plasticity, that was never there before: they are more spontaneous, more expressive and more instinctive, than virtually all his previous work. The imminence of his own end may also have constituted a link with Van Gogh. The more one studies these late paintings, the more one realizes that they are, like Van Gogh's terminal landscapes, a supreme affirmation of life in the teeth of death" (ibid., p. 34).
Throughout this prodigious outpouring of work, the model is Jacqueline Roque, the last great love of Picasso's life; she was fond of gardening at Mougins and may well have worn a straw hat like the one seen here to shield her face from the southern sun. Picasso met Jacqueline at Vallauris in 1952, just as his relationship with Franoise Gilot was beginning to unravel. They took up residence together two years later and married in 1961, a few months shy of the artist's eightieth birthday. Although Jacqueline never posed for Picasso, her image permeates the artist's late work; she becomes the ultimate and universal woman, the object of the artist's obsessive attention. Picasso needed only the stimulation of Jacqueline's proximity, and paintings sprang forth, forming a veritable paean to the strength of his feelings for her: "Jacqueline possesses to an unimaginable degree the gift of turning into painting," he explained to Hélène Parmelin (quoted in Late Picasso, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 58).
Picasso had been fond of painting woman in hats since his early years, and especially during the 1930s, when he shared the Surrealists' fascination with women's headwear as a revealing manifestation of their inner lives. In the present painting, the hat is as much a focal point of the composition as Jacqueline herself, its golden hue standing out against the vivid blue ground. When Picasso painted this canvas, he may have been thinking of Peasant Woman in a Wheatfield by his lifelong idol Van Gogh ("the greatest of them all," he proclaimed), in which the sitter wears a very similar woven bonnet (de la Faille, no. 774; for quote, see ibid., p. 32). The same type of hat, of course, can also be an attribute of the artist himself. Van Gogh donned it in several self-portraits to express his deep kinship with peasants and laborers, and Picasso's painter wears it in a half-dozen artist-and-model scenes from the summer of 1963 and intermittently thereafter. By transferring the hat to Jacqueline in the present painting, Picasso suggests that the artist and his model have become one, a process of imaginative identification that reaches its zenith in canvases that show the bare-breasted model at the easel, brush in hand (e.g. Zervos, vol. 25, no. 24, from earlier in 1965).
The straw hat of Van Gogh, moreover, is no incidental motif, but rather an emblem of the aging Picasso's profound identification with the Dutch master, whom he called his patron saint. John Richardson has written, "Picasso wanted to galvanize his paint surface...with some of the Dutchman's Dionysian fervor. It worked. The surface of the late paintings has a freedom, a plasticity, that was never there before: they are more spontaneous, more expressive and more instinctive, than virtually all his previous work. The imminence of his own end may also have constituted a link with Van Gogh. The more one studies these late paintings, the more one realizes that they are, like Van Gogh's terminal landscapes, a supreme affirmation of life in the teeth of death" (ibid., p. 34).