Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?Pablo Picasso

Femme aux Cheveux Verts exemplifies Picasso’s struggle to capture the essence of a subject over the course of many ‘states” or stages of the image’s progression. A lithograph utilizes a separate stone for each different color so a dramatic difference can be achieved simply by omitting a stone or altering one layer. The present lot depicts Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s lover and preferred sitter at that time, in varying phases; lacking hair, lacking a face, lacking color. We can watch, over the course of these eight states, how a composition can be revised or re-worked, such that there are differences in each stage yet each one plays a role in determining the completed image. 

The unrecorded proof (the print in the top left corner of the grouping on the right), subsititues for the Picasso Project's fifth state.  Here, Picasso combined the first state of the brown stone (as seen in state three), state three of the black stone (as seen in state six) and the first state of the colored stone (as seen in the first state).