The bronze relief of Jacqueline au Bandeau was produced at the beginning of this final phase in Picasso’s career. Around 1962 Picasso decisively broke away from the art historical allusions and iconography of the preceding decade and turned towards the issue of pictorial form. Picasso instead chose to depict isolated figures and archetypes, always focusing his gaze upon the essentials of a narrow range of subjects: the model, the nude, the couple, and the costumed man.

Picasso had always experienced particular bursts of creativity during periods of his most intense love, and this bronze relief hails from Picasso and Jacqueline’s contented post-marital period in 1962 as they settled themselves in Southern France. In Jacqueline au Bandeau, Picasso has thus chosen to depict Jacqueline without any narrative context, keeping her as the singular object and focus of his attention. Picasso and his young wife would spend almost every day together in the closed and private confines of the studio; the artist producing numerous drawings and sketches of his young muse. Yet it is notable that despite Picasso’s numerous images of Jacqueline he would never ask her to sit for him, instead preferring to capture her candid essence, with one of their close friends during this period noting that ‘Jacqueline once told [him] that she had not once posed for Picasso’.

His portrayals of Jacqueline are thus more than simply representations of an artist’s model, they are composites built from Picasso’s subjective perception and memory of his partner: consequently, images like Jacqueline au Bandeau rank as some of the artist’s most personal interpretations of the human face. Picasso’s portraits from this period are therefore character studies as much as they are visual recordings.

PABLO PICASSO

£625,000.00

£39,000.00

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