Tête de femme (Fernande) (Woman´s Head [Fernande])

Pablo Picasso made sculptures throughout his life, imparting an unprecedented freedom to the medium. The 1909 sculpture Tête de femme (Fernande) (Woman’s Head [Fernande]) signalled the birth of Cubist sculpture, with Picasso taking into consideration ethnographic pieces such as Nimba tribal masks and formulating a new system to define the volumes, making some of the concave forms convex, yet without losing a unitary plastic concept. This is manifest in the cheeks and neck, which he endows with great dynamism, unifying the treatment of the face and hair with a unit of interlocking convex forms which define the coiffure at the top and lend force to the twisting neck. The sculpture is a plastic synthesis of the artist’s reflections around form and the integrating and disintegrating forces with which he worked to define what would become Cubist sculpture.

In 1912, art dealer Ambroise Vollard sold a bronze edition of this work in the United States to avant-garde photographer and promoter Alfred Stieglitz, who in August of the same year included his own photographs of the sculpture in the magazine Camera Work and selected it for the Armory Show exhibition in New York the following year.



Carmen Fernández Aparicio