Pablo Picasso
Head1909

On view:

Geffen Galleries

Cubist pencil and chalk drawing of an abstracted human head on cream paper, built from angular planes and dense diagonal hatching

Artist or Maker: Pablo Picasso
Spain, 1881-1973, active France
Title: Head
Culture: Spanish
Date Made: 1909
Medium: Charcoal and brown ink on paper
Dimensions: Sheet: 24 1/4 × 18 1/4 in. (61.6 × 46.36 cm) Frame: 34 5/8 × 28 1/2 × 1 7/8 in. (87.95 × 72.39 × 4.76 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of A. Jerrold Perenchio
Accession Number: M.2025.64.45
Classification: Drawings
Collecting Area: European Painting and Sculpture
Curatorial Notes: Picasso frequently used drawing to develop his most radical ideas. A prolific and adept draftsman, he took advantage of the easy availability of pen, pencil, and paper to explore and expand upon his current artistic preoccupations. After completing his iconoclastic masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, he continued to push artistic boundaries. His partnership with Georges Braque deepened at this time, and the two engaged in an incredibly fruitful exchange—sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive—that would lead to the formal breakthroughs of Analytic Cubism in which the subject is deconstructed and depicted from multiple perspectives.

Head is an outstanding example of Picasso’s early Cubist experiments. The head is composed using a series of insistently straight parallel lines running in different directions and contained by a few selectively deployed curvilinear lines that describe the softer external shapes of the head and neck. The surface of the woman’s face is highly faceted, expressing its volumetric form energetically while nevertheless retaining visual coherence. Shading gives depth to angular planes; some areas recede while others project forward, often in contradictory ways. The position of the figure’s right arm—elbow raised, hand behind head—recalls the central figure in Les Demoiselles. The painting and drawing in fact share the same model: Picasso’s then-companion Fernande Olivier. In the same year, she would be the subject of his first Cubist sculpture, Head of a Woman (Fernande), a cast of which is also in LACMA’s collection (78.6).

Leah Lehmbeck and Erin Sullivan Maynes

2016/2024
Provenance: Douglas Cooper (1911–1984), London and France, from early 1930s, bequeathed 1 April 1984 to;(1) William (“Billy”) A. McCarty-Cooper (1937–1991).(2) [Stephen Mazoh & Co., New York, sold 10 July 1986 to]; A. J. Perenchio (1930–2017), Los Angeles, gifted 2025 to; Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Footnotes
(1) According to photographs of this drawing in the Douglas Cooper Papers 1900–1985 at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Accession no. 860161, Box 53/2, Douglas Cooper art collection photographs). The drawing was still in Cooper’s collection upon his death in 1984 and appears in the Estate Photography Inventory. Douglas Cooper, an art historian, critic, and collector, primarily collected Cubist art, and his Cubist collection was one of the finest individual collections in Europe.
(2) In 1972 Douglas Cooper adopted his romantic partner, the interior designer William A. McCarty, and McCarty added Cooper’s name to become McCarty-Cooper. Upon Cooper’s death on 1 April 1984, McCarty-Cooper inherited Cooper’s art collection and dispersed portions of it by private sale and later, after his death in 1991, at a series of sales at Christie’s in 1992 and 1993, with the bulk of the art collection selling at Christie’s, New York, 11 May 1992.
Selected Bibliography: Lehmbeck, Leah, ed. Impressionist and Modern Art: The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016.
Copyright: © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © Fredrik Nilsen

Related Unframed

Pablo Picasso
Head1909

On view:

Geffen Galleries

Artist or Maker: Pablo Picasso
Spain, 1881-1973, active France
Title: Head
Culture: Spanish
Date Made: 1909
Medium: Charcoal and brown ink on paper
Dimensions: Sheet: 24 1/4 × 18 1/4 in. (61.6 × 46.36 cm) Frame: 34 5/8 × 28 1/2 × 1 7/8 in. (87.95 × 72.39 × 4.76 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of A. Jerrold Perenchio
Accession Number: M.2025.64.45
Classification: Drawings
Collecting Area: European Painting and Sculpture
Curatorial Notes: Picasso frequently used drawing to develop his most radical ideas. A prolific and adept draftsman, he took advantage of the easy availability of pen, pencil, and paper to explore and expand upon his current artistic preoccupations. After completing his iconoclastic masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, he continued to push artistic boundaries. His partnership with Georges Braque deepened at this time, and the two engaged in an incredibly fruitful exchange—sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive—that would lead to the formal breakthroughs of Analytic Cubism in which the subject is deconstructed and depicted from multiple perspectives.

Head is an outstanding example of Picasso’s early Cubist experiments. The head is composed using a series of insistently straight parallel lines running in different directions and contained by a few selectively deployed curvilinear lines that describe the softer external shapes of the head and neck. The surface of the woman’s face is highly faceted, expressing its volumetric form energetically while nevertheless retaining visual coherence. Shading gives depth to angular planes; some areas recede while others project forward, often in contradictory ways. The position of the figure’s right arm—elbow raised, hand behind head—recalls the central figure in Les Demoiselles. The painting and drawing in fact share the same model: Picasso’s then-companion Fernande Olivier. In the same year, she would be the subject of his first Cubist sculpture, Head of a Woman (Fernande), a cast of which is also in LACMA’s collection (78.6).

Leah Lehmbeck and Erin Sullivan Maynes

2016/2024
Provenance: Douglas Cooper (1911–1984), London and France, from early 1930s, bequeathed 1 April 1984 to;(1) William (“Billy”) A. McCarty-Cooper (1937–1991).(2) [Stephen Mazoh & Co., New York, sold 10 July 1986 to]; A. J. Perenchio (1930–2017), Los Angeles, gifted 2025 to; Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Footnotes
(1) According to photographs of this drawing in the Douglas Cooper Papers 1900–1985 at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Accession no. 860161, Box 53/2, Douglas Cooper art collection photographs). The drawing was still in Cooper’s collection upon his death in 1984 and appears in the Estate Photography Inventory. Douglas Cooper, an art historian, critic, and collector, primarily collected Cubist art, and his Cubist collection was one of the finest individual collections in Europe.
(2) In 1972 Douglas Cooper adopted his romantic partner, the interior designer William A. McCarty, and McCarty added Cooper’s name to become McCarty-Cooper. Upon Cooper’s death on 1 April 1984, McCarty-Cooper inherited Cooper’s art collection and dispersed portions of it by private sale and later, after his death in 1991, at a series of sales at Christie’s in 1992 and 1993, with the bulk of the art collection selling at Christie’s, New York, 11 May 1992.
Selected Bibliography: Lehmbeck, Leah, ed. Impressionist and Modern Art: The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016.
Copyright: © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © Fredrik Nilsen