Head of a Woman is one of a group of folded sheet-metal sculptures Picasso made in the 1950s and 1960s. In the sheet-metal sculptures, Picasso used intersecting, planar surfaces to generate works that confounded expectations of the continuous three-dimensional contours typical of much modern sculpture. Works such as Head of a Woman (Tête de femme) present not so much multiple views of the same subject as specific, sharply delineated glimpses of individual, recognizable forms, such as a nose seen in profile or from the front. In the sheet-metal sculptures, we become aware of how little it takes to be able to recognize a line and a dot, for example, as an eye—and how quickly a glance at another surface of the same work can reconfigure that initial impression.

Head of a Woman (Tête de femme)
also called Head of Jacqueline
Painted steel
1957
Pablo Picasso

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