Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Galerie Beyeler, Basel

Acquired from the above on February 13, 1974

Werner Spies, Picasso, Sculpture by Picasso, New York, 1971, no. 450, illustrated

Werner Spies, Picasso. Das Plastische Werk, Düsseldorf, 1983, no. 450, illustrated

Werner Spies, Picasso, The Sculptures, Stuttgart, 2000, no. 450, illustrated p. 375

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Fifties I, 1950-1955, San Francisco, 2000, no. 52-048(d), illustrated p. 90

In the early 1950s, Picasso, Françoise Gilot and their two small children were splitting time between Paris and Vallauris, a town in the Côte d’Azur region, just Northeast of Cannes.  Vallauris was known for its ceramics studio, and the artist took full advantage of developing his skill in this area.  He focused on creating ceramics, plasters and cast bronzes with a variety of themes, from portraits of his children and their mother to emblems of war and peace inspired by the Cold War.   But is most frequent subject was the image of Françoise, whose face he has rendered for the present sculpture.

Picasso first created Visage de Femme in red clay, then he cast the sculpture in a bronze edition of two -- one cast is unnumbered and the other, the present work, is stamped 2/2.  We can see how he incised Françoise's most prominent features into the original clay, creating a rough, linear texture on the surface of the form.  Michael Fitzgerald has written about these depictions of Picasso's young lover:   “Picasso’s portraits present a characterization of Françoise radically different from the one that had introduced her in his art.  Instead of being associated with Marie-Thérèse’s voluptuous form or Olga’s rigid mentality, Françoise – still only twenty-eight years old – now took on features that Picasso had previously used to depict her predecessor, Dora” (Michael Fitzgerald, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, New York, 1996, p. 433). 

Fig. 1 Photograph of Françoise Gilot circa 1943