Pablo Picasso

G. & L. Bollag, Zurich (sold: Galerie Bollag, Zurich, April 3, 1925, lot 157)
Frau Züby, Salzburg
Private Collection (by descent from the above and sold: Sotheby's, London, July 2, 1980, lot 325)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Pierre Daix, Georges Boudaille & Joan Rosselet, Picasso 1900-1906, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Neuchâtel, 1988, no. D. XV. 38, illustrated p. 316
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Supplément aux années 1903-1906, vol. 22, Paris, 1970, no. 448, illustrated p. 157

Tête de femme was executed in the summer of 1906, during Picasso’s stay in the village of Gósol in the Spanish Pyrenees. The artist and his companion Fernande Olivier left Paris in May and, having spent several weeks in Barcelona, visiting Picasso’s family and friends, they left for Gósol in early June. This remote mountain village offered magnificent views and tranquillity, but little in terms of comfort and luxury – the couple stayed in one of the two rooms at Gósol’s only inn, Cal Tampanada. The calm, peaceful atmosphere of his native country gave Picasso new inspiration and energy; he was immensely prolific during the ten weeks spent at Gósol, executing a number of carvings, paintings, drawings, watercolors and gouaches (fig. 1). It was not, however, the magnificent nature and splendid scenery that excited Picasso. During his time at Gósol, he executed very few landscapes, and instead concentrated on portraits and figure-studies inspired by in the peasant girls and youths, the innkeeper Josep Fontdevila, as well as Fernande.

Depicting an anonymous local girl, the present work, nevertheless, reflects the refined features of Fernande; indeed, the two were almost interchangeable in Picasso’s Gósol portraits. As John Richardson pointed out: “The noble beauty with which he invests the girls of Gósol, has a faint, cat-like hint of Fernande, but then, the looks of the reigning mistress are always an ingredient in Picasso’s physiognomical combinations” (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1881-1906, London, 1991, vol. I, p. 438). Apart from the tranquillity of the milieu that surrounded Picasso, the simple, calm beauty of the present work derives from another source: a twelfth-century wooden Madonna and Child sculpture which, according to Richardson, “left more of a mark on Picasso‘s work than is generally allowed” (ibid., p. 452). Richardson argues that the linear, highly stylised features of this Romanesque statue had a strong influence on the development of Picasso’s style during the crucial period of 1906-07, that culminated in his celebrated Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, 1906, gouache, black crayon and pencil on card. Sold: Sotheby’s, London, June 21, 2004, lot 20