Portrait de femme

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Picasso chose to remain in France, refusing offers of sanctuary from friends and supporters in the United States and Mexico. Together with his companion Dora Maar, he fled the South and returned to Paris, at the time under Nazi occupation. He settled into a life of isolation in his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, where he had painted Guernica a few years earlier, and continued to work discretely throughout the war. ‘There was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly, and look forward to freedom,’ he later explained (quoted in H. Janis & S. Janis, Picasso: The Recent Years, 1939 – 1946, New York, 1946, p. 4). The couple continued to meet up with artists and intellectuals, although many had by then left. André Breton and several Surrealists had sought refuge in New York. In 1942, Paul Eluard, one of Picasso’s closest friends, had joined the Resistance, disappearing underground. That same year, the deportation of the Jews of France began.
Despite these tumultuous surroundings, Picasso himself did not necessarily conceive his own war-time pictures as direct representations of the war. “I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict,” he explained (quoted in Picasso and the War Years, 1937-1945, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 13). The tranquil serenity exuding from this work transcends the threatening moments during which it was executed. Probably a portrait of Inès Sassier, the artist’s housekeeper, trusted friend, and confidante, the figure, at the same time, recalls Marie-Thérèse Walter’s features, and anticipates the rounded, almost baroque, strokes with which the artist would portray, years later, Françoise Gilot. A testament to Picasso’s protean virtuosity, this work reveals the complexity of the artist’s portraits.