- Title
- Head of a Woman
- Date Made
- 1906
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 13 3/4 × 8 1/2 in. (34.93 × 21.59 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2005.70.98
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
Early in 1906, twenty-five-year-old Picasso visited an exhibition of ancient Iberian sculpture at the Louvre in Paris. In June he returned to his native Spain with Fernande Olivier, his companion and model; they spent the summer in Gósol (a remote town in the Pyrenees), where he was captivated by examples of medieval Catalan sculpture and made numerous depictions of Olivier using pale colors and dark outlines. After returning to Paris, Picasso’s paintings featured a muted palette, geometrically streamlined forms, rectilinear outlines, and mask-like faces with deep-set eyes, a harbinger of the forms to come in his iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Olivier, the subject of this painting, was depicted in more than sixty of his works, including the Head of a Woman sculpture also on view in this gallery.
Wall label, 2021.
- Provenance
The artist (1881-1973). Roger Dutilleul Collection, Paris; Private Collection, France; [Galerie Beyeler, Basel]; sold in 1998 to Janice and Henri Lazarof, Los Angeles; given in 2005 to LACMA.
- Selected Bibliography
- Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso. Paris: Cahiers d'art.
- Barron, Stephanie. Envisioning Modernism: The Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich; New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2012.
- Copyright
- © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
