Pablo Picasso

Claude Picasso, Paris (by descent from the artist)
Pace Wildenstein, New York
Acquired from the above in 1995

New York, Pace Wildenstein, Picasso and Drawing, 1995, no. 38, illustrated in the catalogue

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1926 à 1932, Paris, 1955, vol. 7, no. 133, illustrated pl. 57 (with incorrect measurements)

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Toward Surrealism, 1925-1929, San Francisco, 1996, no. 28-020, illustrated p. 118 (with incorrect measurements)

Excellent condition. Original canvas. There is some craquelure in the the white pigment that is stable and not visually distracting. Under UV, there are some minor retouches to the framing edge, but otherwise no other signs of restoration. The pigment is stable and in overall excellent condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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The grippingly imaginative Tête marks Picasso's involvement with the Surrealist movement at the end of the 1920s. Limiting his palette to two tonal contrasts, Picasso relies upon the cinematic effect of transparency to create his phantasmagoric image. When we regard this image in isolation, the central focus appears to be a transparent head with a dagger-like tongue projecting from its mouth. But when considered alongside others in this series from 1928, the composition reveals itself to be much more compelling. What we are seeing here are actually two heads: The geometrical silhouette of the artist in white, seen through the profile of a sharp-toothed creature who is understood to represent Picasso's wife Olga. In other versions of this theme, the artist's ghostly head is much more legible, often relegated to the edge of the composition while the sharp-toothed monster looms large in the center of the composition. But here Picasso has united the two images through the bite of the vagina dentata as a dramatic metaphor for the confrontations occurring in his marriage.

Kirk Varnedoe wrote about the symbolism of these ferocious heads from 1928, contextualizing them as scenes from a marriage in trouble and offering his own psycho-analytic explanation: "Picasso wishfully imagines himself as an ombre in the multiple senses of the French term, denoting both a cast shadow and the spirit form of a person released from the mortal encumbrance of the body. The disembodied head inserts Picasso in the scene of strife (of which, of course, the maker, perhaps in more sense than one) as a blameless bystander, intangible, impassive, and even eyeless; and given the interest in unconscious or automatic creativity in the Surrealist circles around Picasso, we might derive still another level of meaning from this mixed imagery of presence and absence.  'Projecting' his shadow into these pictures as a sidewise, silhouette bust with no hands seems a way to position himself as an objective outsider beside the strange configurations that arise from his imagination; denying the frontality and hands-on agency of the conscious painter, he literally does not "face up" to his role as inventor of the image" (K. Varnedoe in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York & Grand Palais, Paris, 1996-97, pp. 147-48).