Painted in 1946, Femme à la robe (Femme Fleur) belongs to a period of Picasso’s work characterised by an increasing energy and artistic freedom after the war years. The work depicts Françoise Gilot who Picasso met in 1943, during his tumultuous relationship with Dora Maar. They settled in the south of France in the year this painting was produced, and the period that followed was marked by great personal fulfilment, during which Picasso was devoted to his family, including the couple’s two children, Claude and Paloma.

Pablo Picasso
Tête (Nature morte à la guitare), 1927-28
oil on canvas
60 by 73 cm.

Picasso was an enormously rich and varied artist, experimenting, over the course of his long career, with a host of different painterly styles, and quickly absorbing the artistic influences of those around him. While many of his ‘styles’ were unique entirely to him, others – such as cubism, classicism and surrealism - were more obviously connected to artistic and literary movements of the moment. First fully articulated in French writer and poet André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto of 1924, the concept of Surrealism evolves around irrational connections, chaos, surprise, and the heightened reality of dreams. Although Picasso never officially joined the Surrealist movement, Tête, painted between 1927 and 1928, dates from that first moment when his work begins to show signs of the influence of the French surrealist thinkers around him. Here, a fluid surrealist line and strong concentrated imagery are set against a schematic background that harks back to Cubism. Major oils from Picasso’s Surrealist period are exceedingly rare and much sought-after on the market, as witnessed by the strong price achieved in London this season when Figure, of 1930, made $11m against an estimate of $4-7m.