Head of a Woman (Fernande)
Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973) · 1909, cast later
A bronze head about forty centimetres high, its surface broken into ridges and hollows so that the face seems to be made of folded metal. The hair is a mass of thick, twisted planes, the neck twists sideways, and the features, although fractured, still add up to a woman's face. She is Fernande Olivier, Picasso's companion, and this is the first Cubist sculpture, made in Paris in the autumn of nineteen hundred and nine after a summer in the Spanish village of Horta de Ebro where Picasso painted her face in the same faceted way.
Walk around the head, because it was made to be seen from every side. The planes that look arbitrary from the front resolve from the side into the bridge of the nose, the cheekbone and the roll of hair. Picasso modelled the original in clay, and the sharp facets are the marks of his thumb and knife translated into bronze. Light is the real subject: each plane catches a different amount, so the head appears to shift and reassemble as you move, exactly as Cubist paintings ask you to see an object from several angles at once.
The sculpture was cast in an edition by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, which is why versions exist in several museums. It was the only three dimensional work Picasso made during the crucial years of Cubism and it opened a path that runs through the whole century, from the Futurist Boccioni to the constructed sculpture of the nineteen sixties. At Tate Modern it typically appears near the early Cubist paintings and drawings, and it rewards ten minutes of slow circling more than any quick look.
Did You Know? Picasso made the original in the studio of his sculptor friend Manolo, and its faceted surface came directly from the paintings he had just finished of Fernande in Spain.
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