Pablo Picasso

Femme se coiffant is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s muse who inspired some of the most romantic and sensual works of his œuvre. The artist met Marie-Thérèse no later than January 1927, when she was seventeen. With the words ‘I am Picasso. You and I are going to do great things together’, the forty-six year old artist introduced himself to the young woman who would soon become his mistress and muse for more than a decade. Many years later Marie-Thérèse recalled the circumstances of their sudden first encounter: ‘I knew nothing – neither about life nor about Picasso. Nothing. I had been shopping at Galeries Lafayette and Picasso saw me coming out of the Metro’ (quoted in L. Levy, Picasso, London, 1991, p. 88).

Captivated by her youthful, unpredictable spirit as well as by her voluptuous physique, Picasso’s renderings of Marie-Thérèse are erotically charged, often showing her in the state of sleep and carefree abandon. Towards the mid-1930s, however, Picasso began to fuse her soft, placid curves with the angularity associated with Dora Maar, the Surrealist photographer who eventually replaced Marie-Thérèse as the artist’s principal source of inspiration and imagery. Nevertheless, as William Rubin has written, ‘None of Picasso’s earlier relationships had provoked such sustained, lyrical power, such as sense of psychological awareness and erotic completeness… Picasso proceeds from his intense feeling for [Marie-Thérèse]… he paints the body contemplated, loved and self-contemplating’ (W. Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971, p. 138). This self-contemplative quality is beautifully presented in Femme se coiffant, showing Marie-Thérèse fully absorbed in the act of combing her hair. The mirror in which she is observing herself, which acts as a frame within the frame, further distances her from the viewer, placing the figure in her own dream-like world.