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Lot Essay
Dating from one of the most pivotal moments of Pablo Picasso’s prolific career and indeed of modern art as a whole, Tête de femme (Head of a Woman) was executed in 1906 during the artist’s seminal sojourn in Gósol, a remote, rural village set amidst the mountains of north west Spain, and was completed on his return to Paris in the autumn. With a deftly applied combination of gouache, watercolour and ink, this work is one of a number of female heads from this transformative period that show the artist moving away from his Rose Period style towards a more primitive, simplified and stylised visual language that marks the very genesis of the movement that would change the course of modern art: Cubism.
Together with his raven-haired muse and first great love, the beautiful artist’s model, Fernande Olivier, Picasso embarked on a journey from Paris to Barcelona in May 1906. This was the first time that the artist had returned to his beloved native land for two years – the longest period that he had ever spent away from Spain. After coming into a considerable sum of money, some two thousand francs, thanks to the dealer Ambroise Vollard purchasing twenty of his most important early works, Picasso was able to return to his family and friends in the Catalonian capital in style, eager to introduce his family to his stylish girlfriend ‘la belle Fernande’ as he called her, and to share his new successes with them. More than this however, Picasso was seeking new inspiration, craving a new setting with which to consolidate his recent artistic developments and, more crucially, to find new inspiration with which to move forward.
After a social two weeks in Barcelona, the pair set off for Gósol, finally arriving along narrow, mountainous tracks by mule in June. The isolated medieval village was a world away from the buzzing cosmopolitan metropolis of Paris and the bohemian world of the Bateau-Lavoir in which Picasso had been immersed. Staying at the only inn in the village, the Can Tempanada, Picasso soon began fervently sketching, drawing and painting, his imagination set ablaze by the wealth of stimuli he found in this Catalonian haven. Indeed, he produced as much work – paintings and works on paper – during the course of this ten or so week Spanish sojourn as he had in the previous six months in Paris. ‘The atmosphere of his own country was essential to him’, Fernande recalled of their trip, ‘and gave him…special inspiration’ (F. Olivier, quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, London, 1991, pp. 435-436).
Happily ensconced in rural Spanish life, Picasso’s art underwent a significant change. Returning to his Spanish roots, Picasso fell under the spell of the ancient, timeless classicism of the Mediterranean. Leaving behind the French symbolist influence that had permeated his contemporaneous Rose period works, he embraced an archaic, simplified and stylised aesthetic, painting with a muted palette dominated by ochre and terracotta tones, the colours of the arid, sun bleached landscape in which he was immersed. He depicted the people of Gósol, the peasants, old innkeeper and children of the village, as well as Fernande with a new sobriety, simplicity and, most importantly, an opacity that appears almost sculptural. Composed of fiery terracotta tones overlaid with softer shades of rose pink and grey, Tête de femme encapsulates this stylistic shift, embodying the Mediterranean-inspired primitivism that characterises Picasso’s great Gósol works.
The female form became a particular focus of Picasso’s art at this time. At the beginning of the year while still in Paris, Picasso had seen a newly acquired collection of Iberian sculptures at the Louvre. These roughly hewn, primitive depictions of the human form had enthralled him, yet, as the artist’s biographer John Richardson has written, ‘For the time being Picasso did not see how to harness their primitivism to his work. The months he was to spend in Spain in the summer would show him how to do so’ (Richardson, ibid., p. 428). In Gósol, Picasso was similarly captivated by a 12th Century wooden Romanesque Madonna that stood in the village church (now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona). Together with the impact of the Iberian sculptures, as well as the numerous non-Western objects that Picasso had seen in Paris around this time, this sculpture led the artist to conceive of a new means of representing the human form, one that was freed from the traditions that had dominated art making since the Renaissance. As Tête de femme shows, Picasso began to simplify the physiognomy of the human face, no longer seeking to portray an exact likeness of the sitter but rather convey a sense of the form, volume and structure of her face. In this painting, the features of the female sitter, most likely Fernande, are stylised: her face and large almond-shaped eyes are flattened as she gazes with a passive, frozen stare that is almost mask-like in its motionless expression. This archaic yet timeless and statuesque depiction of the female form would continue to develop in Picasso’s work over the following months as he took an increasingly sculptural approach in the construction and modelling of the human body, stripping the female face of individuality and sentiment, and instead depicting it with depersonalised mask-like features.
In the middle of August, Picasso’s idyllic life high up in the Pyrenees was abruptly cut short. An outbreak of typhoid in the area meant that he and Fernande were forced to make the long and arduous journey back to Paris. Back in the stiflingly hot city, Picasso immediately returned to his work, painting in his dilapidated studio in the Bateau-Lavoir with an unwavering vigour and ceaseless energy. This was to be one of the most important periods of Picasso’s career and it was during this time that he most likely finished Tête de femme. He continued to transform the female figure into solid, volumetric forms, constructing the human body in sculptural geometric facets. These radical explorations found a final, groundbreaking resolution with Deux nus 1906 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a painting completed in the late autumn that not only marked the culmination of this period of extraordinarily rapid transformation, but paved the way for the iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) of the following year. The words of John Richardson perfectly surmise this momentous period: ‘On his return from Gósol, Picasso put aside any doubts he may have had as to where he stood and where he was going…he had finally seen how primitivism could enable him to fuse the conflicts inherent in his style and vision…Picasso realised that he had the confidence, imagination and power to execute a masterpiece that would [in the words of Apollinaire] “free art from its shackles” and “extend its frontiers”; a painting that would provide artists of the new century a licence to take every conceivable liberty, break every conceivable rule and demolish even the ruins (Richardson, ibid., p. 474).
Together with his raven-haired muse and first great love, the beautiful artist’s model, Fernande Olivier, Picasso embarked on a journey from Paris to Barcelona in May 1906. This was the first time that the artist had returned to his beloved native land for two years – the longest period that he had ever spent away from Spain. After coming into a considerable sum of money, some two thousand francs, thanks to the dealer Ambroise Vollard purchasing twenty of his most important early works, Picasso was able to return to his family and friends in the Catalonian capital in style, eager to introduce his family to his stylish girlfriend ‘la belle Fernande’ as he called her, and to share his new successes with them. More than this however, Picasso was seeking new inspiration, craving a new setting with which to consolidate his recent artistic developments and, more crucially, to find new inspiration with which to move forward.
After a social two weeks in Barcelona, the pair set off for Gósol, finally arriving along narrow, mountainous tracks by mule in June. The isolated medieval village was a world away from the buzzing cosmopolitan metropolis of Paris and the bohemian world of the Bateau-Lavoir in which Picasso had been immersed. Staying at the only inn in the village, the Can Tempanada, Picasso soon began fervently sketching, drawing and painting, his imagination set ablaze by the wealth of stimuli he found in this Catalonian haven. Indeed, he produced as much work – paintings and works on paper – during the course of this ten or so week Spanish sojourn as he had in the previous six months in Paris. ‘The atmosphere of his own country was essential to him’, Fernande recalled of their trip, ‘and gave him…special inspiration’ (F. Olivier, quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, London, 1991, pp. 435-436).
Happily ensconced in rural Spanish life, Picasso’s art underwent a significant change. Returning to his Spanish roots, Picasso fell under the spell of the ancient, timeless classicism of the Mediterranean. Leaving behind the French symbolist influence that had permeated his contemporaneous Rose period works, he embraced an archaic, simplified and stylised aesthetic, painting with a muted palette dominated by ochre and terracotta tones, the colours of the arid, sun bleached landscape in which he was immersed. He depicted the people of Gósol, the peasants, old innkeeper and children of the village, as well as Fernande with a new sobriety, simplicity and, most importantly, an opacity that appears almost sculptural. Composed of fiery terracotta tones overlaid with softer shades of rose pink and grey, Tête de femme encapsulates this stylistic shift, embodying the Mediterranean-inspired primitivism that characterises Picasso’s great Gósol works.
The female form became a particular focus of Picasso’s art at this time. At the beginning of the year while still in Paris, Picasso had seen a newly acquired collection of Iberian sculptures at the Louvre. These roughly hewn, primitive depictions of the human form had enthralled him, yet, as the artist’s biographer John Richardson has written, ‘For the time being Picasso did not see how to harness their primitivism to his work. The months he was to spend in Spain in the summer would show him how to do so’ (Richardson, ibid., p. 428). In Gósol, Picasso was similarly captivated by a 12th Century wooden Romanesque Madonna that stood in the village church (now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona). Together with the impact of the Iberian sculptures, as well as the numerous non-Western objects that Picasso had seen in Paris around this time, this sculpture led the artist to conceive of a new means of representing the human form, one that was freed from the traditions that had dominated art making since the Renaissance. As Tête de femme shows, Picasso began to simplify the physiognomy of the human face, no longer seeking to portray an exact likeness of the sitter but rather convey a sense of the form, volume and structure of her face. In this painting, the features of the female sitter, most likely Fernande, are stylised: her face and large almond-shaped eyes are flattened as she gazes with a passive, frozen stare that is almost mask-like in its motionless expression. This archaic yet timeless and statuesque depiction of the female form would continue to develop in Picasso’s work over the following months as he took an increasingly sculptural approach in the construction and modelling of the human body, stripping the female face of individuality and sentiment, and instead depicting it with depersonalised mask-like features.
In the middle of August, Picasso’s idyllic life high up in the Pyrenees was abruptly cut short. An outbreak of typhoid in the area meant that he and Fernande were forced to make the long and arduous journey back to Paris. Back in the stiflingly hot city, Picasso immediately returned to his work, painting in his dilapidated studio in the Bateau-Lavoir with an unwavering vigour and ceaseless energy. This was to be one of the most important periods of Picasso’s career and it was during this time that he most likely finished Tête de femme. He continued to transform the female figure into solid, volumetric forms, constructing the human body in sculptural geometric facets. These radical explorations found a final, groundbreaking resolution with Deux nus 1906 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a painting completed in the late autumn that not only marked the culmination of this period of extraordinarily rapid transformation, but paved the way for the iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) of the following year. The words of John Richardson perfectly surmise this momentous period: ‘On his return from Gósol, Picasso put aside any doubts he may have had as to where he stood and where he was going…he had finally seen how primitivism could enable him to fuse the conflicts inherent in his style and vision…Picasso realised that he had the confidence, imagination and power to execute a masterpiece that would [in the words of Apollinaire] “free art from its shackles” and “extend its frontiers”; a painting that would provide artists of the new century a licence to take every conceivable liberty, break every conceivable rule and demolish even the ruins (Richardson, ibid., p. 474).