“[...] This formal interplay of line and colour shows that the faun is a pretext for a stylistic exercise in which reality and readability tend to disappear.”

When he painted this work in oil on paper, Pablo Picasso was in his sixty-fifth year, an established and indeed famous artist, already the subject of various retrospectives and internationally known in particular for his sensational painting Guernica (1937, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia,), the embodiment of the simultaneously political and universal dimension of his art. Soon after the end of World War II, having spent all of the occupation in his studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins in Paris, Picasso moved to the South of France and renewed contact with his Mediterranean roots. He spent the summer of 1945 in Antibes, the ancient Antipolis, immersed in antiquity. He and his new mistress, the young painter Françoise Gilot, moved the following year to the Riviera, where he produced a series of more luminous works while embarking on new paths in ceramics and sculpture. 

Simultaneously the instrument and symbol of this regained freedom, the artist’s work became purer and more decorative with graphic cutouts, superimposed geometric forms of vibrant, transparent colour. La Femme Faune (Female Faune) is fully representative of this new vocabulary, which unquestionably owes a great deal to the geographic proximity of his lifelong friend and rival Henri Matisse, who was producing large cut-outs with gouache on paper in Nice. This large-sized work is part of a broader set on vélin d’Arches paper produced in late August and early September 1946, at least four of which are now in the Musée Picasso in Antibes (Tête de faune chevelu, 31 August; Tête de faune vert, 2 September; Tête de faune sur fond gris argent, 3 September; Tête de faune gris, 8 September). In addition to its technique, combining a work in enamel paint, oil or watercolour with India ink, graphite or charcoal, La Femme Faune also shares the same general characteristics: 

“The head is made up of geometrical forms, a hexagon for the face, two crescents for the horns, two lozenges for the ears and a rectangle or triangle for the neck. Moreover, Picasso uses flat colours to disrupt the marked linearity of the construction, soften the geometry and endow the hieratic figure with life and rhythm. This formal interplay of line and colour shows that the faun is a pretext for a stylistic exercise in which reality and readability tend to disappear.”¹

An integral part of his Mediterranean culture, mythology was always both a source and a familiar universe for Picasso, a storehouse of subjects and motifs that enabled him to experiment with new artistic approaches while sometimes also appropriating the great narratives for autobiographical purposes. As early as the 1930s, after the illustrations commissioned by Albert Skira, Ovid’s Metamorphoses constituted the point of reference for numerous connected works, and Picasso had already recognised his alter ego in the Minotaur, the fabulous and tragic creature, half-man and half-bull. His post-war interest in the figure of the faun is coherent in this with a taste for the Western artistic tradition and the practice of reusing a classical iconography that crystallised after his move to the South: “It’s odd that I never drew fauns, centaurs or mythological heroes in Paris. It’s as if they can only live here.”² This time, however, it is a joyful mythology that predominates. Here the faun becomes an arcadian figure, sunny and sovereign, constantly multiplied and freely transformed by the artist in painting and drawing, printmaking and ceramics. 

Proof is provided precisely by this Femme Faune, a metamorphosis of the rustic divinity, heir to the Greek satyr, simultaneously human and animal with his goat’s hooves and horns, in a version that is, if not explicitly feminine (the hairy chest is more typical of a masculine torso), at least dual, with the superimposition of a mysterious female profile. Evidence of thus almost Dionysian disguise is provided by the presence of lines under the chin that could indicate a beard. 

Emilia Philippot

The painting was purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti at a Sotheby’s auction in London on 30 November 1993 [Ed.].

¹Venice 2006-2007, pp. 46-47.

²J. Leymarie, in Gaudichon-Matamoros 2013, p. 19.