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Artworks
Pablo Picasso
Tete De Femme, 1933Etching41.0 × 31.0 cm
16.1 × 12.2 inEdition of 50Series: EtchingSigned “Picasso” in bold, thick pencil in the lower rightTête de Femme is an etching executed by Pablo Picasso in 1933, signed in bold pencil in the lower right margin and numbered 46/50, placing it within a small and...Tête de Femme is an etching executed by Pablo Picasso in 1933, signed in bold pencil in the lower right margin and numbered 46/50, placing it within a small and carefully controlled edition. The piece sits within one of the most significant periods in Picasso's career — the years surrounding the Vollard Suite, the monumental series of 100 prints commissioned by dealer Ambroise Vollard between 1930 and 1937, during which Picasso's engagement with etching reached its greatest intensity and ambition.
The subject is a female head in profile, rendered through a network of fine, closely worked etched lines that build form through tone rather than outline — a departure from the pure contour line of many of his prints of this period, and evidence of Picasso's sustained exploration of the full technical range of the intaglio medium. The face is radically simplified and biomorphically distorted, the features dissolved and reassembled into swelling, organic forms that owe as much to Surrealism — then at its height in Paris, and a movement with which Picasso maintained a complex, never fully committed relationship — as to the Cubist tradition from which his formal approach had emerged. The profile reads simultaneously as a face and as an arrangement of abstract volumes, the eye subsumed into the broader curvature of the skull, the nose and jaw pressing forward with a sculptural solidity that recalls the plaster heads and biomorphic sculptures Picasso was producing at Boisgeloup during the same years.
The sitter is almost certainly Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young woman Picasso had met in 1927 and with whom he maintained a secret relationship throughout the early 1930s. Her rounded, classically regular features recur throughout his work of this decade, here transformed by the pressure of his formal imagination into something more elemental and less immediately legible — a head that belongs as much to dream as to observation.
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