Pablo Picasso

Galerie Simon, Paris
Private Collection, Europe

Stockholm, National Musei Strävan att Luta Andra trakter au Sverige, Picasso, 1965, no. 42, illustrated in the catalogue

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Œuvres de 1926 à 1932, Paris, 1955, vol. 7, pl. 119, no. 290, illustrated
Picasso in Chicago. Paintings, Drawings and Prints from Chicago Collections (exhibition catalogue), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1968, p. 9, illustrated
John Golding, Picasso in Retrospect, New York, 1973, p. 95, no. 158, illustrated
Felix Andreas Baumann, Pablo Picasso, Leben und Werk, Stuttgart, 1976, p. 120, no. 211, illustrated
Picassos Surrealismus, Werke 1925-1937 (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle, Bielefeld, 1991, p. 179, no. 7, illustrated; p. 224, no. 6, illustrated
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture. Toward Surrealism  1925-1929, San Francisco, 1996, p. 192, no. 29-017, illustrated

During the 1920s Picasso was in close contact with the Surrealist group and was particularly friendly with the poets André Breton, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard whose unfettered creative imagination provided him with a new stimulus in his work. Although Picasso was formally a member of the Surrealist group at the outstart in 1924, he did not sign any of their manifestos, but did participate in group exhibitions.  Monument: Tête de femme of 1929 belongs to the extraordinarily creative period in the late 1920s and early 1930s when, informed by the culture of Surrealism, Picasso's art was at its most visionary and disturbing. André Breton wrote of Picasso as early as 1925: "We proudly claim him as one of ourselves, even though it would be impossible and would besides be impudent to bring to bear on his means the critical standards we propose to apply elsewhere. Surrealism, if it is to adopt a line of conduct, has only to pass where Picasso has already passed and where he will pass again..." (A. Breton, Surréalisme et le Peinture, Paris, 1925).

The surrealist works that Picasso created during this period depict some of his most violent and sexually powerful distortions of the female body in his entire œuvre and can in many ways be seen to reflect the duality in his personal life which was dominated at this time by his deteriorating relationship with his wife Olga and the beginning of his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter. Monument: Tête de femme is a remarkable and unique work in which Picasso has transformed his violent sculptural distortions of the female body into an architectonic structure that he has painted as a giant monument silhouetted against the sky. Dominating the small male figures that walk around underneath it, the most threatening aspect of this figure is its mouth which has been rotated into a vertical ellipse and punctuated with sharp teeth. Evoking the mythic vagina dentata or toothed vagina, the primitive and aggressive forms of this semi-abstract mouth combine into a powerful symbol of castration. This monstrous aspect of the structure stirs the unconscious mind in a way very similar to that of much tribal art, particularly the Oceanic sculpture that was greatly admired at this time by both Picasso and the Surrealists for its humorous and highly metamorphic use of sexual imagery.

The sculptural merging between the figure of a woman and that of a building may have its origins in Picasso's proposed monument for Apollinaire that had been a long-term ambition of the artist and was one of his central preoccupations during the late 1920s. The monument as such was never built but his ideas for it evolved into the large constructed iron sculpture Femme au Jardin. In contrast to the radical reduction of the woman's features to an open triangular-like form is clearly a product of the harsh geometry and impossible sculptural constructions of Picasso's 1928 paintings of women. These powerful works, which were later to have such a profound influence on Francis Bacon, seem violent in the way that they reduce the female form to the sharp impersonal angles of Constructivist geometry. Monument: Tête de femme takes this tendency in Picasso's art to its extreme by depersonalising the woman to the point where she becomes in the monument, a solely inanimate three dimensional construction. At the same time, the towering nature of the building and its aggressive sharp-toothed window transform it into a fetishistic icon to be feared or worshipped. In combining these two elements within one striking and semi-abstract image, Picasso illustrates how his own uniquely personal vision could absorb the key artistic tendencies of his time. Monument: Tête de femme is a powerful painting that transcends and reconciles the seemingly opposite movements of Constructivism and Surrealism.

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Figure (Femme dans un fauteuil), 1927, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Baigneuse, 1928, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, La Femme au Voile, 1929, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 4, Pablo Picasso, La Demoiselle (Tête), 1929, oil on canvas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm