Pablo Picasso - Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse or Head of a Woman (Tête de femme)
The world knows Pablo Picasso as, first and foremost, a purveyor of the Cubist and Surrealist movements. Artists have historically attributed their inspiration to a specific idea or person, and Picasso was no exception. One of the most important muses during his artistic career was his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had a lasting impression throughout his life, up until his death in 1973. With his Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse, a drypoint print created in 1933 and currently housed at the Chazen Museum of Art, Picasso imbued in his work the experiences of his intimate relations with Marie-Thérèse and his interest in the artistic expression of the transformation and metamorphosis of the human form.
During the summer of 1923,1 Pablo Picasso became acquainted with André Breton and the Surrealist movement by extension, as Breton soon became was one of its key proponents in the coming years.2 Through his friend, Picasso endeared himself to the Surrealist principles, including those supporting the power of the subconscious, the irrational,3 and the notion of accidental fate and l’amour fou (“mad love”). During a time in which Picasso felt restrained by the “bourgeois straightjacket that Olga [his wife] had tried, with some success, to impose on it [Picasso’s life],”4 Surrealist ideals were a welcome liberation and a breath of fresh air. From this point on, Picasso grappled with his artistic identity as a former follower of the Cubist Movement, a supporter of the Surrealist Movement, and how to reconcile the two artistic styles he gained from both.5 While Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse remains recognizable as a head of a figure - Synthetic Cubism greatly emphasizes the viewer’s ability to view visual symbols in art and relate that to their own interpretation of the work - the qualities that lend the print its very ambiguity and seemingly “irrational” or “random” transformative qualites are entirely of the Surrealist mind.
Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter met in late January 1927 at random in the street,6 a testament, it seemed, to the Surrealist notion of le hasard (“chance”) Picasso held so dear.7 She was in her teenage years and he in his forties and already married to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.8 Instantly drawn to her, he requested to create a portrait of her. After battling her initial suspicions, she consented.9 So began an intimate relationship that continued during his current marriage, throughout his next marriage and subsequent affairs, and finally until his death. She served as the inspiration for a large amount of his sculptures, prints, and paintings, an influence so large that art historians have even dubbed his artistic period between 1927 and 1941 the “Marie-Thérèse years.”10
While Marie-Thérèse’s family approved wholeheartedly of her relations with Picasso, perhaps owing to the fact that her mother had also fallen in love with a painter, Picasso still felt compelled to hide his infidelities from his wife. Olga Khokhlova (now Olga Picasso) was a jealous woman, who also suffered a nervous disorder; Picasso did not wish to put her under further emotional stress. He began inserting Marie-Thérèse into his works through a code of abstract and geometric features throughout his paintings. Historians note her as often appearing, “as a guitar, its strings ready to be plucked and its sound hole to resonate; as the boomerang-shaped collar she had bought when they first met....” He even intermingled her initials with his in some cases, demonstrating the depth of his affection toward her.11
After a number of years of renting summer houses in order to discreetly continue his relationship with Marie-Thérèse, Picasso purchased a country home in 1930. He told both Marie-Thérèse and his wife that he had bought it for them alone, which both agreed was a suitable arrangement. Olga would spend weekends at the home and return to their Paris apartment during the week, at which point Marie-Thérèse would come to the house.12 There was never any evidence that Olga discovered Marie-Thérèse’s identity, though she remained well aware of her husband’s infidelities.13 In 1934, Pablo and Olga filed for divorce, though it was never legally enfored. At the same time, Marie-Thérese announced she was pregnant.14 Nonetheless, Picasso was careful about maintaining the secrecy of their relationship from all but a few friends.15
Picasso and Marie-Thérèse’s daughter, born in September of 1935, was dubbed María de la Concepción, nicknamed Maya by those close to her.16 Much to Marie-Thérèse’s dismay, it was only a couple months after the birth of their child that Picasso began pursuing relationships with other women. Despite these roadblocks, the two continued an intimate relationship for years after. During a private getaway with Marie-Thérèse in an attempt to assure her of his eternal affection, Picasso began to paint once again.17 In the meantime, the Spanish Civil War had exacerbated tensions across the country, and upon his return to Paris, Picasso directed his efforts to humanitarian relief for the Spanish side.18
Years later, upon Olga’s death, Picasso telephoned Marie-Thérèse and asked for her hand in marriage, to which she replied no. Picasso then went on to marry one of his mistresses, Jacqueline Roque, with whom he had lived for the last several years. When Picasso died in 1973, Marie-Thérèse did her best to ensure his children’s health and assure them of her everlasting devotion to their father.19 A mere four years after his death, she committed suicide out of grief.20
Picasso’s Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse (alternatively called Head of a Woman [Tête de femme], identified as Marie-Thérèse Walter) was created in February of 1933 as the final stage of twenty impressions. Though some viewers may struggle at first to interpret the figural head from the dancing motion of Picasso’s lines, there is nonetheless an indisputable representational quality in the work. The closer one looks, the more they may see different components of the body start to emerge: the head, the nose, part of an ear, perhaps the remnants of an eye.
One can see the Surrealist notion of metamorphism and transformation at play in this print, an idea that fascinated Picasso. In his essay on Picasso and his relationship with portraiture, William Rubin explains the artist’s affinity for transformative qualities as follows: “Exploiting the resources of his accumulated language of figuration, he [Picasso] would distribute differing aspects of their personalities...through a whole series of portrayals that often altered dramatically from one image to the next.”21 In Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse, a continuous arc stretches above the face, cut off abruptly by the edges of the plate, suggesting a greater circular motion and thus the potential for the human form to stretch and transform beyond its physical boundaries. In essence, this is the process of metamorphosis, during which the form exceeds its too-familiar capacity and manifests itself into something almost transcendent of its previous form.
The drypoint printing process lends itself well to the metamorphic aspects of Marie-Thérèse’s head and the Surrealist ideals of transformation. A type of engraving, drypoint is a process during which a pointed stylus is used to create incisions in a plate. Pieces of the plate are pushed up from the pressure, called burr. Instead of being wiped away as in the engraving process, the burr remains on the plate during the inking and impression process. After several runs, the burr is worn on the plate, creating a faded softness around the once-sharp incised lines. Because of the impermanent nature of burr, drypoint printing is not conducive to large amount of impressions,22 especially if the artist seeks crisp, even lines. Yet it is from this very process that viewers are chanced a glimpse at Picasso’s creative process, from beginning to end.
The Chazen Museum’s particular impression was not the first female head that Picasso had portrayed. Indeed, during his artistic career, the tête de femme was a recurring subject throughout his works, “a specific figurative motif [from which] the very idea of transformation of signification and distortion of form [was] articulated.”23 Picasso had created numerous impressions of the same head in a sequence, allowing one to see the gradual progression of the incised lines on the plate. He understood the printing process and was cognizant of the effect the previous impressions would have on the final print; that is, he knew that viewers would be privy to his printmaking process by looking at the final Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse impression.
For most of his artistic career, Pablo Picasso remained hesitant to title or otherwise denote his works with any sort of terminology, preferring to allow the artist to draw their own interpretations of the subject based on their own experiences and thoughts.24 In fact, he only occasionally used the word, “portrait,” to describe his works,25 though many believe that portraiture, or what the contemporary world considers “portraiture”, composes a great amount of his œuvre. Despite this, Picasso’s use of the drypoint medium and his understanding of its physical transformative qualities are reflected in his Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse, an intimate portrait of a close lover who had successfully re-awoken his artistic consciousness and his love for Surrealism. Transformation is present throughout the print, both in its formal qualities and the very notions of the Surrealist movement Picasso depicts through a representation of his lover, Marie-Thérèse.
Elizabeth Bigelow
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1Carsten-Peter Warncke, Pablo Picasso: 1881-1973 (New York: Taschen, 1997), 121.
2William Beadleston and John Richardson, Through the Eye of Picasso, 1928-1934: the Dinard Sketchbook and Related Paintings and Sculpture (New York: William Beadleston, 1985), 1.
3Warncke, Pablo Picasso, 121.
4Beadleston and Richardson, Through the Eye of Picasso,1.
5Warncke, Pablo Picasso, 127.
6John Richardson and Diana Widmaier Picasso, L’Amour Fou: Picasso and Marie Thérèse (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011), 62.
7Beadleston and Richardson, Through the Eye of Picasso, 2.
8Ibid., 1.
9Richardson and Widmaier Picasso, L’Amour Fou, 11.
10Ibid., 40.
11Ibid., 17.
12Ibid., 21.
13Ibid., 25.
14Ibid.,30-32.
15Ibid., 32.
16Ibid., 36.
17Ibid., 38.
18Ibid., 40.
19Ibid., 57.
20Ibid., 58.
21William Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 14.
22Wendy Thompson, "The Printed Image in the West: Drypoint,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003).
23J. F. Yvars, “The Content of the Form: Picasso’s Biomorphic Motifs,” in Life and Death in Picasso: Still Life/Figure, c. 1907-1933 by Christopher Green (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 23.
24Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture, 15.
25Ibid., 14.