Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

Among Pablo Picasso’s earliest sculptures, Tête de femme dates from a transformative moment in the artist’s early career, during which he was inundated with stimulating influences that decisively changed the course of his art. With a striking simplicity, the stylised face of Tête de femme encapsulates the radical new direction that Picasso had begun to take at this time, as he started to rethink the nature of representation, opening up bold new possibilities for both painting and sculpture.

Conceived between 1906 and 1907, Tête de femme dates from the artist’s so-called ‘Iberian’ period. At the beginning of 1906, Picasso had discovered a newly acquired collection of Iberian sculptures at the Louvre, and was entranced by the faces of these ancient objects. His summer trip to Gósol, a remote, rural village high up in the Spanish Pyrenees, heightened his interest in sculpture, opening his eyes to the unique aesthetic qualities of this three-dimensional art form. Indeed it was this summer sojourn that, as the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler stated, marked the beginning of the artist’s lifelong experimentation with this medium (W. Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, Stuttgart, 2000, p. 31).

On his return to Paris, Picasso’s art changed. Leaving behind the Symbolist motifs and flattened waif-like figures of his Rose period, he began to transform the figure into solid, volumetric forms, taking a particularly sculptural approach in the construction and modelling of the human body.Likewise, the female face would become endowed with a monumental symmetry, as seen in Tête de femme. This stylistic change demonstrates how Picasso forged a new mode of representation that was not solely reliant on a European academic tradition, but instead one which incorporated a new language infused with his aesthetic appreciation of the formal possibilities abstraction and simplification of form found in significant works from outside the western art canon. Tête de femme marks the beginning of this trailblazing trajectory: this conception of the female form would become central to Picasso’s work of 1907, and reached its clearest apogee in the iconic and iconoclastic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
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