Head of a Woman (Fernande)

model 1909, cast before 1932

Pablo Picasso

Sculptor, Spanish, 1881 - 1973

A woman’s face and neck are roughly modeled in this dark green, freestanding bronze sculpture. In this photograph, her face is angled to our right. She looks down, chin tucked back into her neck. She has deep-set eye sockets, a thin, blade-sharp nose, and her small mouth is closed, the corners downturned. Light from our left gleams off some of the surfaces, especially in the choppy hair and along the edge of her nose. A long diagonal ridge on the right side of her neck, our left, suggests a tendon stretching as she turns her head. Her neck acts as the sculpture's base. The background lightens from pale gray along the top to white along the bottom, where the sculpture casts a faint shadow to our right.
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On View

East Building Mezzanine, Gallery 217-B

Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(Ambrose Vollard, Paris), in 1909.[1] (Galerie d'Art Latin, Stockholm); purchased by Charles Nilsson [d. 1968], Stockholm, at least by 1959;[2] (Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York); purchased 20 August 1968 by the Fort Worth Art Center;[3] purchased 7 January 2002 through (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York) by NGA.
[1] The sculpture was probably conceived in the fall of 1909 and made originally in clay. Shortly thereafter, under the direction of the dealer Ambroise Vollard, an unnumbered edition of around fifteen to eighteen casts was made. (A numbered edition of ten was cast in 1959 by the Valsuani foundry under the direction of Heinz Berggruen.)
[2] Letters from 1970 and 1971 to Henry Hopkins, then director of the Fort Worth Art Center (now the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth), provide the information that Charles Nilsson purchased the sculpture from Galerie d'Art Latin, whose director was Mr. D'Arquian. Mr. Nilsson's son, Charles Nilsson, Jr., wrote that D'Arquian was a French Count, and that his father probably made the purchase just after World War II. The elder Nilsson owned the sculpture at least by 1959, when he lent it to an exhibition in Stockholm. One of the letters implies that it was Nilsson, Jr., who sold the sculpture in 1968 along with a great part of his father's collection after the elder Nilsson's death. (Letters of 30 December 1970 from Karin Bergqvist Lindegren, Curator, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; 25 January 1971 from Charles Nilsson, Jr.; and 18 February 1971 from Jan Runnqvist, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Stockholm, copies in NGA curatorial files)
[3] The Picasso sculpture was purchased along with a Kandinsky painting from Acquavella Galleries by the Fort Worth museum, in exchange for the museum's Renoir painting Jean with a Hoop, given originally by Ruth Carter Stevenson with permission to deaccession, and with a donation by Mr. and Mrs. J. Lee Johnson III.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1959

  • Picasso, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Stockholm, 1959, no. 40, repro., as Tête.

1963

  • Onskemusseet (The Museum of our Wishes), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1963-1964, no. 22.

1970

  • The Cubist Epoch, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970-1971, no. 288, pl. 281 (shown only in New York).

1973

  • Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings from the USSR, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1973.

1974

  • Twentieth Century Art From Fort Worth and Dallas Collections, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1974.

1976

  • The Permanent Collection: A 75th Anniversary Retrospective, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1976.

1986

  • Collecting: A Texas Phenomenon, Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, 1986, no. 1 (under sculpture from The Fort Worth Art Museum), repro.

1987

  • Creativity in Art and Science, 1860-1960, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1987, no. 19, repro.

1995

  • Loan for display with permanent collection, Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, 1995-1996.

2003

  • Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Oliver, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2003-2004, no. 66, repro.

Bibliography

2004

  • Wilkin, Karen. "La Belle Fernande in Washington." The New Criterion 22, no. 6 (February 2004): 53-55.

2015

  • "Art for the Nation: The Story of the Patrons' Permanent Fund." National Gallery of Art Bulletin, no. 53 (Fall 2015): 19, repro.

2023

  • Glinsman, Lisha Deming, Daphne Barbour and Shelley Sturman. "When the Workshop is Fluid: Observations on Parisian Bronze Casting in the Early Twentieth Century." Daphne Barbour, ed., Facture. Conservation, Science, Art History 6 (2023): 153 fig. (detail), 180, 181 fig. 25

Inscriptions

on proper left side: Picasso

Wikidata ID

Q63861995

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