Shown almost frontally, the huge, hieratic head is marked by a single wrinkle on the forehead that gives the mask below all its realism and encapsulates the subject’s tormented feelings. 

The face of Dora Maar (1907-97), French photographer, poetess and writer, first appeared in Pablo Picasso’s works in 1936 or perhaps 1935,¹ when their relationship unquestionably began. While uncertainty still lingers over the circumstances in which they met and the accounts do not tally,² those of Paul Eluard and Brassaï, supplemented by others in a sequence of Chinese whispers, attest to a meeting in the Deux Magots café in the autumn of 1935. She was wearing black gloves and stabbing a knife into the table between her fingers. Fascinated by the scene, Picasso asked her for her blood-stained gloves and kept them in a reliquary-like glass case. His work from then to the end of World War II was marked by numerous series of portraits of this Surrealist muse. From the “postscript to Guernica” portraits of the Femme qui pleure (Weeping Woman) to the Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Woman in an Armchair) and Femme au chapeau (Woman in a Hat) multiples photographed by Maar herself in the Grands Augustins studio in 1939 (Série de portraits de Dora Maar devant “Femmes à leur toilette” [Series of Dora Maar Portraits in Front of Women at the Dressing Table], Paris, Musée national Picasso) by way of the nude (Femme se coiffant, 5 March 1940, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Picasso turned the concept of the portrait upside down by embarking on the metamorphosis of Dora Maar. While the portraits of Fernande Olivier had opened the way to his Cubist discoveries and those of Olga Khokhlova embodied a return to classical values, Maar’s face instead underwent exaggerated distortion to become a disturbingly strange icon of grief, sometimes even of an animallike character with a snout for a nose (Femme au chapeau assise dans un fauteuil [Woman in a Hat in an Armchair], 1942, Zervos, vol. XII, 7) or claws for fingers (Dora Maar au chat [Dora Maar with a Cat], 1941, private collection). 

The Cerruti Collection Tête de femme (Head of a Woman) not only forms part of these pictorial investigations but also stands out in virtue of the intensity of the emotions depicted. Painted early in 1942, when the couple were going through a hard winter under the German occupation, Maar’s face reflects the general anxiety in an expression paralysed by fear. The impression of suffocation and angst accentuated in other canvases by the box-like structure developed in the background (Femme dans un fauteuil, 1941-42, Basel, Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum) is created here by the very close framing of the model, who is too big for the space. The hat, a recurrent accessory in the portraits of Dora Maar, gives the scale of proportions and considerably accentuates the size of the face with its swollen outline. Shown almost frontally, the huge, hieratic head is marked by a single wrinkle on the forehead that gives the mask below all its realism and encapsulates the subject’s tormented feelings. The asymmetrical arrangement of the features strengthens the dynamism of the portrait. Unlike other more radical explorations, however, including the sketches in the background of the canvas itself (fig. 1), this Tête de femme does bear a certain resemblance to Dora Maar (fig. 2). Picasso endows the woman - who signed herself “La photographe, la méchante” on a postcard to him in 1939³ - with a tragic mask that is not devoid of sincerity. The power of the Cerruti Collection portrait unquestionably lies in this tragic humanity underscored by the black and grey Guernica palette of 1937. 

Juliette Pozzo

The work entered the Cerruti Collection before 1993. Indeed, on 30 June of that year it is recorded in the handwritten inventory of assets present in the villa in Rivoli [Ed.].

¹Baldassari, in Paris-Melbourne 2006, p. 36.

²De Mondenard, in Rome 2017, p. 68.

³Postcard, summer 1939, Archives Picasso, Fonds Dora Maar.