Tête de Femme by Picasso, a Bronze Sculpture from 1906-1907
This rare bronze edition of a Head of a Woman from 1906-1907 provides an opportunity to revisit a pivotal moment in Picasso’s artistic production. A moment when sculpture sheds light on the painter’s work and reveals his inspiration ..
Estimate: €100,000/150,000
Pablo Picasso once said “sculpture is the best comment a painter can make on painting”. Trained in the graphic arts, the Spanish artist embraced sculpture, self-taught and seizing opportunities to learn as they arose. Working in a variety of techniques, Picasso found that mass served as a vehicle for pursuing his thought processes. As early as 1902, influenced by Rodin, he began working in raw clay, but it was from 1906 onwards that he really developed this practice as a way of pursuing his research and resolving pictorial problems. This was a pivotal year in his career, as the exhibition “Picasso 1906. The Turning Point” at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum examined last year. Having left behind the psychological aspects of the Blue and Rose periods, the Picasso experimented with a more analytical approach that would become Cubism. Influenced by his visit to the Louvre exhibition of archaic Iberian bronzes, and then by his encounter with early Romanesque and Catalan art during his stay with Fernande Olivier in the village of Gósol, in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of France, he tackled volumetric, synthetic female forms. Picasso had been working for months on the portrait of Gertrude Stein, holding a series of posing sessions without managing to get past a blockage, but his return from Gósol enabled him to get to the heart of the matter and “adjust” the painting from memory. He developed a schematic treatment that can be seen in his sculptures, such as male and female heads. The eyes, often almond-shaped, the nose and the mouth are considered analytically, and seem to form an addition of measurable elements. Going as far as the mask, the barely-modeled faces go straight to the point, displaying no precise expression.
While the documentation from the Musée Picasso, Paris, listed seven examples in 2013, including the one in its collection, others have since come up for sale. This unpublished edition could be the ninth or tenth in this limited series.
A Truly Cubic Sculpture
Our head, identified as that of his partner Fernande, who frequently served as the artist’s model during this period, is the first step towards what the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler declared to be “a truly cubic sculpture, a sculpture aimed at creating solids in space, solids with their own existence”. The real breakthrough came with another head, also of Fernande, dated 1909, which attracted particular attention from collectors. In 1910, Ambroise Vollard bought a series of sculptures from Picasso, mostly plaster casts, which he commissioned to be cast in bronze and marketed. Listed under number 12 in Werner Spies’ catalog raisonné, the 1906 Tête de femme is signed on the reverse and bears the inscription (or date) “1933” on the inside. While the documentation from the Musée Picasso, Paris, listed seven examples in 2013, including the one in its collection, others have since come up for sale. This unpublished edition could be the ninth or tenth in this limited series. Vollard worked with several foundrymen, but more particularly, in the case of Picasso’s work, with Florentin Godard, to whom he commissioned eleven bronzes from different models between 1921 and 1939. Art historians Élisabeth Lebon and Diana Widmaier Picasso, count 31 Picasso fonts between 1926 and 1928, although the foundryman’s account books provide no further information on the pieces in question or their commissioners. The estate sale of Godard’s studio in 2004, which included a copy of our Tête de femme (Head of a Woman), revealed an agreement with Picasso, who was concerned to perpetuate and diffuse, through the strength and timelessness of bronze, a fragile work, important in the development of his thought process.
Tuesday 04 March 2025 – 14:00 (CET) – Live
26 bis, allée Saint-François – 29600 Morlaix – Saint-Martin-des-Champs
Dupont & Associés
