PABLO PICASSO Jacqueline au Bandeau de Face (Grand Tête de Femme).
Color linoleum cut, 1962. 641x530 mm; 25 1/4x21 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 32/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Arnéra, Vallauris. Published by Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris. A superb, richly-inked impression of this large, important color linoleum cut.
Among the more than 150 color linoleum cuts that Picasso produced during the 1950s and 1960s, none stand out for their boldness of execution and sheer artistry more than the colorful, semi-abstract portraits of his second wife, Jacqueline Roque (1927-1986). Picasso's entry to the medium of color linoleum cut coincided with his introduction to Jacqueline in the early 1950s; he had tried his hand at a few monochromatic linoleum cuts in the 1930s, but never pursued the medium any further until the mid 1950s.
Abandoned by her father, Jacqueline was 18 years old when her mother died of a stroke. Following a short marriage to an engineer named André Hutin, Jacqueline settled in southern France in the ealy 1950s and took a job at the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris. Picasso met Jacqueline, then 27 years old, in 1953 while he was beginning what would become a creative outburst of limited edition pottery at the Madoura workshop. They were married in 1955, following the death of Picasso's first wife, Olga Koklova.
In these color linoleum cut portraits of Jacqueline, Picasso exaggerated her large, dark eyes, arching eyebrows and high cheekbones. These characteristics would become steadfast in his later portraiture. Picasso's series of paintings that derived from Eugène Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger was said to be inspired by Roque's beauty. Picasso declared that "Delacroix had already met Jacqueline," alluding to his painting her into the famous series; similarly inspired was Picasso's portrait of Jacqueline as Lola de Valence, an ode to her beauty playing on Édouard Manet's iconic portrait of the famed Spanish dancer.
Jacqueline's later decades with Picasso were fraught with hardship and contention. After his death in 1973 she spent years in litigation with Picasso's mistress François Gilot and his children over his estate. Tragically, she committed suicide in 1986, 13 years after Picasso's death, on the eve of the opening of an upcoming exhibition of her private collention of Picasso's work in Spain. Bloch 1069; Baer 1303.
