Buste de femme

The striking, dark-haired protagonist of this 1960 portrait bears an unmistakable likeness to Jacqueline Roque, the woman who would become, a year later, the artist’s second wife and devoted companion for the rest of his life. Wearing a striped top, reminiscent of Picasso’s own blue and white Breton shirts, Jacqueline stares out of the painting, her hand resting upon her chin in a pose of introspection. With bold, lavish strokes of dark paint, Picasso has rendered her powerful wide-eyed gaze, depicting half of her face plunged into deep shadow. Appearing as if seated in front of a mirror, Jacqueline’s head seems to be reflected in the space behind her. In many ways this dramatic handling of light across his sitter’s face prefigures the cut-out, sheet metal sculptures that Picasso began a few years later.
In 1952, Jacqueline Roque was working as a sales assistant at the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris. Picasso lived nearby and frequently visited to work on his own ceramics there. The artist was at this time living with Françoise Gilot, and their two young children, Claude and Paloma. By September of the following year, however, their gradually deteriorating relationship came to a dramatic end. Gilot left Picasso and returned to Paris with her two children. By 1954, he had begun a new relationship with Jacqueline, her unmistakable features appearing in his art in the summer of this year. “How could I have had any reservations about Pablo’s intentions," Jacqueline said of these pictorial declarations of love (quoted in J. Richardson, Late Picasso, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1988, p. 17).
Unfailingly loyal and devoted to Picasso, Jacqueline also served as his most important model. Renowned for her raven colored hair, large, almond shaped eyes and striking, aquiline profile, Jacqueline appears in myriad ways in Picasso’s late work, her presence filling every aspect of his art. His depictions of her constitute the single largest group of his portraits, dominating the art of the final two decades of his life. “It is her image that permeates Picasso’s work from 1954 until his death, twice as long as any of her predecessors,” John Richardson has written. “It is her body that we are able to explore more exhaustively and more intimately than any other body in the history of art… And lastly it is her vulnerability that gives a new intensity to the combination of cruelty and tenderness that endows Picasso’s paintings of women with their pathos and their strength” (ibid., p. 47).
Portraiture remained the vehicle through which Picasso most closely explored his wife’s physiognomy—the proliferation of these works a testament to his deep love and admiration for her. He painted her in a range of styles and poses, using her constant presence as a means to experiment artistically. One of the couple’s friends, the writer, Hélène Parmelin, recalled seeing a group of portraits of Jacqueline, describing, “Picasso had just been showing us serious faces with huge close-set eyes, sort of Mona Lisas with elongated hands…women engrossed beneath hats, or bareheaded with eyes and hair in every shape and position; one with a little head, full face and double profile, within her great somber profile... They are the Dames de Mougins, the queens, the beloved ones, the Jacquelines, all watching us at once with an incomparable serenity” (Picasso Says..., London, 1969, p. 29). Parmelin continued, “[Jacqueline] has within her that wonderful power on which the painter feeds. She flows… She unfurls ad infinitum. She invades everything. She becomes all characters. She takes the place of all models of all the artists on all the canvases. All the portraits resemble her, even though they may not resemble each other. All the heads are hers and there are a thousand different ones” (Picasso: Intimate Secrets of a Studio at Notre Dame de Vie, New York, 1966, pp. 14-15).
In 1961, the year after he painted the present work, the artist’s first wife, Olga, from whom he had been separated for many years, passed away. As a result, Picasso and Jacqueline were married this same year in a small ceremony of just two witnesses. Not long after, they moved into the large home, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, where the couple would remain contentedly for the rest of Picasso’s life. As David Douglas Duncan, a frequent visitor and friend of the artist, once playfully wrote:

“They lived in a world of his own creation—
where he reigned almost as a king
yet cherished only two treasures
freedom to work and the love of Jacqueline”
(Picasso and Jacqueline, New York, 1988, p. 9)