![Pablo Picasso - Head of a Woman [1935]](http://c3.staticflickr.com/8/7060/27485858810_587a7c14f5_b.jpg)
Instantly recognisable as a portrait of Picasso’s celebrated muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, this serene, elegant and radiant composition belongs to the extraordinary group of canvases depicting the artist’s beloved mistress who marked his art of the early 1930s. The present painting is one of the most geometrically complex renderings of Marie-Thérèse, depicted as a bust on a pedestal and reminiscent of the large plaster sculptures of her that he created several years earlier. Picasso completed this canvas at the height of the Surrealist movement in 1935, when Freudian psycho-sexual symbolism played a defining role in the imagery of the avant-garde. But Picasso's composition here, with the deconstructed appearance of the pedestal and the bust, is a decidedly forthright example of the artist's individualism.
[Sotheby’s, London - Oil on canvas, 65 by 54 cm]