Female Head, 1932 (casting 1973)

About the Work

Two spheres as eyes, a phallic nose and hair which has been gathered into thick bulges: there is little evidence here of the beauty of Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he had been living since 1930. In a series of four monumental heads, the artist presented the features of his model in increasingly abstract form and translated them into separate volumes. In this third version the supporting structure of the head is clearly visible, revealing some of the creative process. Picasso was famous as a painter rather than as a sculptor but left a wide-ranging sculptural oeuvre of over 600 works.