From Sotheby's:
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.
Tête de femme is constructed with the sharp, linear elements that were defining features of Picasso's early Cubist compositions, yet the colours are unlike any that Picasso had ever used before - pulsating red, shrill orange and yellow, and soothing marine tones of green and blue. One of the more unexpected elements of the composition is the thickly-painted latticework, reminiscent of Picasso’s chair caning collages from the early century, as well as his still-lifes from the 1920s. Indeed, more than any other model, Marie-Thérèse inspired Picasso's creative genius, and her very image conjured a creative synthesis of the most radical aspects of Picasso's production. What distinguishes this work is the way in which Picasso was able to incorporate elements from various different parts of his own career – most notably the voluminous treatment characteristic of his plastic work, the grid-like background reminiscent of his ground-breaking collages, and the geometric distortions of the figure’s body and facial features borrowed from the Cubist canon.
With their rich colouration and their soft yet pronounced curves, Picasso's Marie-Thérèse pictures are renowned as being amongst his most inspired compositions, ranging in mood from dreamy to euphoric. In fact, of all the manifestations of Picasso's exceptionally prolific career, it is during the period dominated by Marie-Thérèse that his creative force was at its most powerful. Among the most significant of these paintings is Tête de femme, created when Marie-Thérèse was firmly at the centre of Picasso's emotional and artistic universe. The work’s unusually vibrant palette is similar to the one he used for his allegorical depictions of Marie-Thérèse reading or drawing, such as Deux femmes, executed several weeks earlier. By the time he painted the present composition, Picasso’s focus on new aesthetic and personal concerns were apparent. In March 1935 Marie-Thérèse was in the early stages of pregnancy with their daughter Maya, who would be born in September, and the composition bears specific references to the young woman’s state, from the swell of her breasts rising in the foreground to the crescent moon - symbol of the Roman fertility goddess Diana - that shadows her face. The simple yet bold outline of the breasts and the green latticework in the background also forecast the linear direction of Picasso’s work in the weeks to come.