Picasso - B256 Tete de Femme

Only Picasso could manage to so utterly lay bare the soul of his muse, despite such extensive anatomical distortion, or perhaps because of it. For all her altered features, Marie-Thérèse still manages a demure, introspective look with her stony, sightless, inwardly directed eye and her sensitive lips. At the same time, she compellingly engages the viewer, seemingly asking, "Yeah, right--you say there's a what on the top of my head?"

This head of a woman represents one of Picasso's many stylistic forays into surrealism, the cutting-edge movement in art of the period. Though Picasso refused to ally himself with this movement, he was clearly its inspiration and its vanguard. As André Breton, who is best known as the principal founder of surrealism, conceded, “Surrealism, if it tends to define a line of action, simply has to go where Picasso has gone, and where he will return” (quoted in C. Piot et al, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 232). Sir Roland Penrose described the radicalism of Picasso's surrealism in the context of his previous work as follows, “These excursions into realms formerly forbidden by a canonical respect for beauty were more profoundly disturbing than the attacks made by Cubism on academic conceptions of painting. They upset man’s vision of himself which had sprung from classical tradition. But we were to discover, thanks to Picasso, that the image of man did not reside only in an ideal conception, but that in its nature it should be organic and alive” (Picasso: Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, pp. 255-256).

As is readily apparent from the rather long list of references above, this magnificent print has been included in every general book on Picasso prints, at least those in our library. It is significant on several levels. In 1931 and -32, Picasso developed a wondrous unique style, one more in a chain of innumerable unique styles, in which Marie-Thérèse’s facial features were modeled in plaster with exaggerated, thick, rounded forms, which have been likened to ropes or sausages by various writers. The results in plaster and later in bronze were magnificent and compelling (see an example of one of these bronzes, Buste de Femme, PP.31:029, below). About twelve months later, in February and March, 1933, Picasso made several etchings of Marie-Thérèse’s head including this one that look very sculptural and are modeled in the same style as the recent plasters. Three of these, Bloch numbers 250, 255, and this one, 256, are simply amazing works. That Picasso could create such shapes out of plaster was amazing enough, but that he could imbue their two-dimensional representations on paper with such sculptural volume was in and of itself incredible.

Right after creating these works, Picasso began incorporating similarly modeled heads onto full-length figures of models in the sculptor’s studio, or into the form of sculptures within the studio. All of these prints were later grouped into the Vollard Suite, and, because of its much larger edition size as well perhaps as its cache, are better known. (See, for example, Bloch numbers 146 and 219, illustrated as Figures 14 and 18 in Chapter 6 of One-Dollar Picasso elsewhere in this website. Other examples include Bloch numbers 148-158, 176 and 218.) As far as these strangely modeled heads goes, the smaller series of portraits to which this Tete de Femme belongs is most impressive because of the larger scale of these portraits and because the viewer’s attention is not distracted from these sculptural portraits by the presence of other pictorial elements.

This Tete de Femme is also unusual because it is perhaps the only Picasso print, in addition maybe to his lithographic fingerpainting (Paloma et Claude, Bloch 664, see elsewhere in this catalogue) in which the technique is not only innovative—typical fare for Picasso—but in which the very technique itself is charming! In creating this portrait, Picasso used his mistress’ nail polish as a sort of resist with which he drew directly onto the raw copper plate. Then, a prolonged dip in acid lowered the surface level of the copper plate everywhere except where the nail polish had been applied, yielding a “negative engraving” in which the image, rather than engraved into the plate itself, is presented in relief, such that everything other than the image would get the printer’s ink. Baer refers to the medium of this print as an etching, but that is likely because the actual technique, unique in this application yet somewhat akin to aquatint, has yet to be named.