Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Working in Paris during the summer of 1906, Picasso started to develop the theme of a woman dressing her hair. Standing nudes sensually holding up their hair or allowing it to fall loosely to one side of the shoulder were frequently depicted in drawings of the time (J. Palau i Fabre, op. cit., nos. 1355-1360). Picasso continued to explore this theme, developing it further into a seated nude and subsequently into a kneeling woman braiding her hair.

Fernande Olivier, Picasso's mistress and primary model at the time, is almost certainly the model for this kneeling figure allowing her hair to fall loosely down at her side. Femme se coiffant is one of the most striking examples of a direct link between the sculpture of Paul Gauguin and that of Picasso who had visited the Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1906. The Spanish artist was undoubtedly taken with Gauguin's sculpture Oviri, a figure imbued with the mysticism of the jungle. As John Richardson has written, "There is a slight Iberian look to this figure, but Oviri and her ceramic prototypes...are the main sources for Fernande's air of mystery. For the first time, we get an inkling of what Picasso meant when he said that his sculptures were vials filled with his own blood" (op. cit. , p. 461).