In January of 1962, Pablo Picasso found himself engrossed by a single image: a bust of his final muse, Jacqueline Roque, wearing a large straw hat. The artist reworked this composition over several days, producing a diverse body of paintings, prints, and works on paper that de- and re-constructed one of Picasso’s most enduring subjects. Tête de femme au chapeau takes its place in the long lineage of female portraits that traced both the artist’s visual trajectory and his much-mythologized love life. Jacqueline is depicted in a straight-on, frontal view which is complicated by profile elements—such as the side of her mouth and nose—that recall the artist’s earlier Cubist idiom. Radiantly rendered in Miró-esque thick crayon, she wears a blue-striped blouse evocative of Picasso’s iconic Breton shirt and greets the viewer with wide eyes. The present work exudes a palpable confidence and playfulness that characterizes his mature approach.

 

His longest-lasting relationship, Picasso and Jacqueline’s marriage marked a final period of ebullience in the artist’s life. The two met at the Madoura Pottery workshop in the South of France in 1953, where he was creating ceramics and she worked as a sales clerk. Instantly captivated by the 27-year-old, Picasso drew a dove on her house with chalk and reportedly brought her a rose every day for six months until she accepted his advances. They married in 1961, less than a year before he executed Tête de femme au chapeau, and relocated to a villa near Mougins, where they spent the last 12 years of Picasso’s life. The subject of 70 of his portraits in 1962 alone, Jacqueline was his greatest muse, and their relationship spawned a particularly fruitful chapter in the artist’s oeuvre. Her likeness is captured in the present figure’s dark brunette hair and eyebrows, black eyes, and exaggerated high cheekbones—all of which became frequent motifs in Picasso’s late works.

 

 “When I was [a child] I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like [children].”
—Pablo Picasso

 

The exuberance of Tête de femme au chapeau is further conveyed by Picasso’s employment of vibrant colored crayons, a medium that resurfaced with increasing frequency in the artist’s work in the 1950s and 1960s. His interest in youthful materials during the period has been credited to times he spent drawing with his young children, Claude and Paloma, whom he shared with his previous partner Françoise Gilot. Perhaps in light of his own increasing age—he had turned 80 just months before executing Tête de femme au chapeau—the exposure to his children’s vitality and playful imagination undoubtedly informed his pictorial language and choice of media. Picasso recognized in Paloma and Claude’s compositions an expressive rawness and crudity which stood in stark contrast to his own precocious abilities: a prodigious master of academic drawing techniques, he was admitted to art school when he was only thirteen years old. “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael,” Herbert Read recalled him saying at an exhibition of children’s drawings, “but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”ⁱ

 

This exultant representation of Jacqueline is a nod to his many earlier depictions of woman donning straw hats, from Dora Maar to Marie-Thérèse Walter. Coalescing the lyricism found in his paintings of the 1930s with the rigorous spatial ambiguity of his Cubist period, Tête de femme au chapeau gestures to many of the pictorial strategies that have defined Picasso’s corpus. Considering the myriad synergies between this image and his past work, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was created during a particularly introspective time in the artist’s life, when he was reflecting on the breadth of his career. Just a few months after he made Tête de femme au chapeau, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a comprehensive retrospective that spanned six years of his practice. The image was later memorialized as an emblem of this body of work when a corresponding lithograph was printed by Stuttgart's Daco-Verlag in 1990.

 

 

ⁱ Richard Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 3^rd ed., Berkeley, 1981, p. 307