Grande Tête de Femme is a colour linocut executed by Pablo Picasso in 1962, signed and numbered in pencil, and belongs to the celebrated sequence of large-format colour linocuts produced at Vallauris in collaboration with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra that represents the summit of Picasso's late work. As the title indicates, this is a work conceived at scale — the head filling the picture plane almost entirely, cropped at the shoulders, the face pressing close to the viewer with an urgency that is entirely characteristic of the boldest prints in the series.

The subject is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's wife and the overwhelming preoccupation of his portraiture throughout the 1960s. Her features are rendered through the Cubist double-view that Picasso had employed since the 1930s and which the linocut medium suits with particular precision — one half of the face presented frontally, the other in three-quarter view, the two aspects fused along the central axis of the nose into a single image that is simultaneously more and less than a conventional likeness. The palette is reduced to warm terracotta, dark brown-black and the natural buff of the ground, with fine white lines scratched back into the surface of the darker areas to describe the fall of the hair — a technique that exploits the full textural range of the medium.

The reductive linocut method, in which a single block is progressively cut and printed in successive colours with no possibility of correction, demands an unusual combination of forward planning and absolute commitment — qualities that suited both Picasso's temperament and the monumental directness of his late style. Grande Tête de Femme is among the most concentrated and formally resolved works of the 1962 series — a portrait stripped to its essentials, in which the scale of the image, the economy of the palette and the physicality of the cut line combine to produce a work of immediate and lasting power.

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