Head of a Woman: Picasso’s interpretations of Fernande Olivier

Edited on the 4th September 2024. Originally published on 22nd April 2013.

During a visit to Chicago in 2013, I viewed the Picasso Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Prominent amongst the exhibited artwork, was the sculpture “Head of a Woman (Fernande)”. It is not a simple sculpture. It is an adventure. Every angle opens new dimensions, interpretations, and insights into what the object / person might be.

Portrait of Fernande Olivier, 1906

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
printed by Eugène Delâtre (French, 1864-1938)

Medium: Drypoint with plate tone on copper in black on ivory laid paper
Dimensions: Image/plate: 16.3 × 11.9 cm (6 7/16 × 4 11/16 in.); Sheet: 31.8 × 23.8 cm (12 9/16 × 9 3/8 in.)

Picasso and Fernande Olivier met on a rainy day in August 1904. Fernande became reportedly Picasso’s first known long-term relation & subject of many of Picasso’s Rose Period paintings (1905-07). Their romance lasted until 1909, but continued to be together as friends until 1912.

Title: Fernande with a Black Mantilla (Fernande à la mantille noire)
Date: Paris, ca. 1905
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 39 3/8 x 31 7/8 inches (100 x 81 cm)
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Thannhauser Collection, Bequest, Hilde Thannhauser, 1991
Copyright: © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I quote from Guggenheim’s website.

Images of labor abound in late-19th- and early 20th-century French art. From Jean-François Millet’s sowers and Gustave Courbet’s stone breakers to Berthe Morisot’s wet nurses and Edgar Degas’s dancers and milliners, workers were often idealized and portrayed as simple, robust souls who, because of their identification with the earth, with sustenance, and with survival, symbolized a state of blessed innocence. Perhaps no artist depicted the plight of the underclasses with greater poignancy than Picasso, who focused almost exclusively on the disenfranchised during his Blue Period (1901–04), known for its melancholy palette of predominantly blue tones and its gloomy themes. Living in relative poverty as a young, unknown artist during his early years in Paris, Picasso no doubt empathized with the laborers and beggars around him and often portrayed them with great sensitivity and pathos. Woman Ironing, painted at the end of the Blue Period in a lighter but still bleak color scheme of whites and grays, is Picasso’s quintessential image of travail and fatigue. Although rooted in the social and economic reality of turn-of-the-century Paris, the artist’s expressionistic treatment of his subject—he endowed her with attenuated proportions and angular contours—reveals a distinct stylistic debt to the delicate, elongated forms of El Greco. Never simply a chronicler of empirical facts, Picasso here imbued his subject with a poetic, almost spiritual presence, making her a metaphor for the misfortunes of the working poor.

Picasso’s attention soon shifted from the creation of social and quasi-religious allegories to an investigation of space, volume, and perception, culminating in the invention of Cubism. His portrait Fernande with a Black Mantilla is a transitional work. Still somewhat expressionistic and romantic, with its subdued tonality and lively brushstrokes, the picture depicts his mistress Fernande Olivier wearing a mantilla, which perhaps symbolizes the artist’s Spanish origins. The iconic stylization of her face and its abbreviated features, however, foretell Picasso’s increasing interest in the abstract qualities and solidity of Iberian sculpture, which would profoundly influence his subsequent works. Though naturalistically delineated, the painting presages his imminent experiments with abstraction.

Nancy Spector

Another 1906 picture “Head of a woman (Fernande)”, is totally different in style. Space and perspective are somehow distorted. The angular aspects of the face are prominent. As John Richardson comments in his “A Life of Picasso”, as we approach 1907, “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” cleared the way to cubism. Two years later, Picasso paints Fernande in the “Head of a Woman” as a multi-level distorted face.

Artist: Pablo Picasso
Title: Head of a Woman
Date: 1909
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 60.3 × 51.1 cm (23 3/4 × 20 1/8 in.)
Credit Line: Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Copyright: © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I quote from the Art Institute of Chicago’s website.

This painting dates to one of the most productive and inventive periods of Pablo Picasso’s career, a summer stay in the town of Horta de Ebro (now Horta de San Juan) in Spain, which lasted, with minor interruptions, from May to September of 1909. During these months, Picasso produced a series of landscapes, heads, and still lifes that are among the most highly acclaimed achievements of early Cubism. Picasso’s companion, Fernande Olivier, was the model for the series of heads that the artist produced at this time.
In this painting, the contrast between the naturalistic still life in the background and the boldly faceted figure in the foreground illustrates an important stage in Picasso’s evolution at the time. A series of still lifes by Picasso that were inspired by the art of Paul Cezanne preceded Picasso’s powerful probing into the nature of solid form, which is exemplified here by the treatment of the head. By vigorously modeling the form in a manner that blatantly disregards the rules of illusionistic painting, Picasso conveyed information about the subject’s underlying structure, about its development in the round (Olivier’s bun, for example, which would normally not be visible from the front, is brought into full view), and a remarkably tactile sense of its projections and recessions. Not surprisingly, these highly sculptural portraits led Picasso to turn, as he did intermittently throughout his career, to actual sculpture upon his return to Paris in the autumn of 1909. The result was the head of Fernande Olivier, an early bronze cast of which is in the Art Institute. In this sculpture, Picasso combined the faceting of the face seen in our painting with the scalloped treatment of the hair found in a drawing from this same period, which is also in the collection of the Art Institute. The artist then energized the head through a dynamic torsion of the neck, replacing the relaxed, fleshy folds in the painting with an emphasis on the taut curve of the back of the neck, as the head bends and twists in space. Although Cubism was to exert an enormous influence on the move toward abstraction among many artists in the early part of this century, Fernande Olivier reminds us that Cubism itself was firmly rooted in an intense study of material reality.
This painting was once in the famed collection of expatriates Leo and Gertrude Stein in Paris, and can in fact be seen hanging on the wall of Gertrude Stein’s study in a photograph of 1914-15.

—Entry, Margherita Andreotti, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, The Joseph Winterbotham Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago (1994), p. 138-139.

“Woman with Pears” painted in 1909 has the same style.

Pablo Picasso, Woman with Pears
Horta de San Joan, summer 1909

Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 36 1/4 x 27 7/8″ (92.1 x 70.8 cm)
Credit: Florene May Schoenborn Bequest
Copyright: © 2024 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This is one of several portraits Picasso painted of Fernande, during the summer of 1909, a period that the couple spent in Picasso’s native Spain. While the pears in the background are modeled in the round, Picasso radically reconfigured Oliviers head and bust, fragmenting them into geometrical segments. This fracturing of solid volumes offered an alternative to the traditional illusionistic and perspectival approach to depicting three–dimensional space on a two–dimensional surface and suggests the direction Picasso’s process would take in the development of Cubism. (Source: MOMA).

Pablo Picasso, 1909, Tête de femme (Head of a Woman), gouache on paper

62.2 x 48 cm (24 1/2 x 18 7/8 in.),

Museum of Modern Art, New York

To contrast Picasso’s 1909 approach to painting the head of a woman to one of his later approaches, I present below a painting of 1924.

Head of a Woman, 1924

Medium Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions unconfirmed: 345 × 265 mm frame: 610 × 510 × 95 mm
Collection Tate
Acquisition Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate Gallery 1995

I quote from Tate Gallery’s website:

Picasso’s Head of a Woman is a small, intimate painting of a female head in a classical, pensive pose. The colour is non-naturalistic and the features of the head summary. No specific sitter is known, and the anonymous title is probably an imposition as Picasso did not usually title his work. He signed and dated the painting ‘Picasso 24’, in the top right-hand corner, but the stretcher bears the inscription ‘February 1925’. This may suggest that he began Head of a Woman at the end of 1924, and this tallies with Christian Zervos’s placing of the work in the catalogue raisonné (reproduced Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, 1923-5, V, Paris 1952, p.155, pl.357). Labels on the back indicate that it was exhibited in the first retrospective of Picasso’s art at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in June 1932, and that at one time it belonged to the British collector Hugh Willoughby.

The woman’s face divides into two distinct halves, recalling the multi-facetted subjects of Picasso’s Cubist paintings of the early 1920s. The divided portrait expresses two sides of the woman, as though viewed from different angles, or possibly a combined male-female head. Picasso marked out the features with a few schematic lines in dark brown paint on flat areas of pink and white. A muted earth tone covers the background and a patch of sienna designates the shoulder of the woman’s dress. Picasso appears to have incised the lines in the thick impasto with the handle of a paintbrush. He used simple forms, such as the triangle and ellipse of the eyes. She is shown with her head on a claw-like hand, with an erratic line forming the woman’s fingers.

Head of a Woman typifies Picasso’s freer style of 1923-4, in which he began to move away from his classicising tendency and his geometric Cubism. Alfred Barr (1902-81), the founding director in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, named Picasso’s art of 1923-4 ‘curvilinear’ Cubism, due to its exclusion of rectilinear geometry. For Barr, this style was distinguished by ‘a flattening of volume and space, the overlapping and transparency of planes and simultaneity of points of view, disintegration and recombination and generally the independence of colour, form, space and texture without abandoning all reference to nature’ (Barr, p.132). During 1924, Picasso was being courted by the founder of the Surrealist group, André Breton (1896-1966), who viewed the artist’s Cubist painting as a forerunner of Surrealism. This interest encouraged Picasso’s new direction towards the powerful expression found in such paintings as The Three Dancers 1925 (Tate T00729).

Further reading:
Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1946, p.132
Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928, New Haven and London 1987, pp.69-72
Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York 1993, pp.181-6
The Musée Picasso, Paris: II Drawings, Watercolours, Gouaches, Pastels, London and Paris 1988, p.279, pl.890

Kathleen Brunner
March 2000
Revised Matthew Gale March 2001

My greatest artistic emotions were aroused when the sublime beauty of the sculptures created by anonymous artists in Africa was suddenly revealed to me’ Picasso told the poet Apollinaire. The sculpture of his companion Fernande Olivier is flat, planed surface relates the work to his cubist paintings of the same period. Picasso made two plaster casts of the head, from which at least sixteen bronze examples were cast.

Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909
Plaster
18 1/2 × 14 1/8 in | 47 × 35.9 cm
Raymond and Patsy Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA

“One of only two plasters made by Picasso from which at least sixteen bronzes were cast, this version is completely white, unlike Tate Modern’s version which has been toned in a brownish finish (presumably to emulate bronzes cast from it). The point of Cubism was to disregard one-point perspective in painting—long held since the Renaissance—breaking down the picture plane, the prison of two dimensions, enabling the artist to show the object or figure in the round.” (Culture Spectator, PABLO PICASSO AT MFA HOUSTON UNTIL THE 27TH MAY 2013)

Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909, Tate Gallery, London

Medium: Plaster
Dimensions: unconfirmed: 405 x 230 x 260 mm
Provenance: Lent from a private collection 1994

© Succession Picasso/DACS 2018, courtesy Private Collection
Image ID #: L01712
Accession #: L01712

Medium: Bronze
Dimensions: 16 1/4 x 9 3/4 x 10 1/2″ (41.3 x 24.7 x 26.6 cm)
Object number: 1632.1940
Copyright © 2024 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I quote from MOMA’s website:

Picasso sculpted Woman’s Head (Fernande) out of clay in Paris in the fall of 1909. It was made directly after the artist spent the summer in Horta de Ebro, Spain, where he painted numerous portraits of his companion, Fernande Olivier. Woman’s Head (Fernande) shows Picasso working through ideas that would become central to Cubism. The sculpture maintains the basic shape of a head, but its projected and recessed planes break down solid mass into shifting volumes that are suggestive of different points of view.

Can you see how he pushed and pulled the clay to form her nose, eyes, cheeks, and hair? Picasso wasn’t trying to make her look the way she looked in real life. Instead, he wanted us to see her from many angles at once.

Picasso’s dealer, Ambroise Vollard, bought the original clay version from Picasso in 1910, and with the artist’s permission he arranged for it to be cast in plaster and then in bronze.

Head of a Woman (Fernande), Metropolitan Museum of New York, New York
Clay original: Paris, autumn 1909; Plaster model: Paris, late 1910; Bronze cast: Foundry Désiré or Florentin Godard, Paris, made to order for Ambroise Vollard between July 27, 1926, and March 11, 1927

Dimensions: 16 1/4 × 9 3/4 × 10 1/2 in. (41.3 × 24.8 × 26.7 cm)

Credit Line: Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Gift of Leonard A. Lauder, 2021

Rights and Reproduction: © 2024 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I quote from the MET’s website.

In bronze, Head of a Woman is energized by light. Highlights and shadows across its projecting planes suggest shifting volumes that convey different points of view. The tilt of the head and curve of the neck imply movement. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz was one of the first to acquire a bronze cast of the work, which he photographed and later published in his journal Camera Work. The sculpture’s publication there as well as its appearance in the influential New York presentation of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, in 1913 garnered it great attention. This cast, from Foundry Désiré or Florentin Godard in Paris, is one of several that Picasso’s dealer Ambroise Vollard ordered to meet his clients’ interests after World War I.

In 1909, over a ten-month period, Picasso was inspired to create more than sixty Cubist paintings, sculptures, and drawings of women that bear a striking resemblance to his paramour at the time, Fernande Olivier. Although few of these works could be considered traditional “portraits,” they do form a unique group within his oeuvre that shows him working with unusually singular focus. This bronze head of Fernande was modelled in autumn 1909 in Paris after the couple returned from a summer trip to Spain (Horta de Ebro), and represents Picasso’s first Cubist sculpture. Like his early Cubist paintings, the shape of her sculpted head is faceted into smaller units. Fernande’s hair, which she wore up in a rolled do, is here a series of crescent blobs, while her contemplative face is more sharply chiselled into flat planes. Intended to be seen in the round, the composition changes form when viewed from different angles, and the head’s slight tilt and the neck’s sweeping curves give the allusion of movement as if she were about to look over her shoulder. (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Artist: Pablo Picasso
Title: Head of a Woman (Fernande)
Date: 1909
Medium: Bronze
Inscriptions: Signed, b.l.: Picasso
Dimensions: 40.7 × 20.1 × 26.9 cm (16 1/8 × 9 7/8 × 10 9/16 in.)
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Copyright: © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Art Institute’s bronze is one of a small edition produced by the Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1910. It was sold in 1912 to the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who loaned it to the New York presentation of the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Better known as the Armory Show, this ground-breaking exhibition presented European avant-garde art to American audiences for the first time and travelled to the Art Institute in March 1913. (from the Art Institute of Chicago’s website)

I conclude the post with Jonathan Jones’s pertinent remarks (Source: Head of a woman, The Guardian)

“Like Rembrandt’s most intimate portraits, it is about the mystery of being close to another human being. Picasso makes you recognise this by inviting your eye down into those channels and crevices, until you feel you are inside Fernande’s head.

This is one of the seminal works of cubism, and in the state that Picasso liked it best. He moulded Fernande’s head in clay, then made two plaster casts from which he authorised a series of bronzes. He never liked the bronzes as much as this raw plaster version. It is a key work in the development of cubism because it was the first time Picasso realised he could translate his new kind of painting into three dimensions this is one of his paintings from that time given solid form.”