©Pablo Picasso - Head of a Woman 1921

Picasso Head of a Woman 1921
Head of a Woman
1921 65x50cm pastel on paper
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:
This pastel is a study for "Three Women at the Spring" (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Picasso's major neoclassical composition painted in the autumn of 1921. Although the gigantic goddesses in that work seem otherworldly, their features were in fact inspired by Picasso's wife, the Russian dancer Olga Kokhlova. The scale and technique, however, derive from the ancient wall paintings Picasso had seen in and around Rome and Naples in 1917 while working for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; it was on that same trip that he met and fell in love with Olga.