Head of a Woman (Tête de femme), also called Head of Jacqueline

Pablo Picasso

1957

Painted steel

Nasher Sculpture Center

"Head of a Woman" is one of many painted sheet-metal sculptures that Picasso made during the 1950s and 1960s. Its subject is Picasso’s companion at the time, Jacqueline Roque, whom he would marry in 1961. Radical differences in facial features from one point of view to another invests the portrait with multiple viewpoints and identities, with the sharp edges and intersecting planes of the head slicing through space to suggest, rather than define, volume. This work, along with another made from the same template in the Musée Picasso, Paris, would become the model for Picasso’s first monumental concrete sculpture, the Nasher’s "Head o