The woman featured in this magnificent painting is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s devoted second wife, who remained with him until his death in 1973. Jacqueline’s entry into the artist’s life in 1952 had a profound impact on him and his oeuvre and she became the constant subject and source of inspiration for his art in his final two decades. No other figure looms larger in Picasso’s life and art than Jacqueline and out of all the women Picasso was with throughout his life, it was Jacqueline who would appear most often in a variety of guises, poses and media.

Renowned for her raven colored hair, dark, almond shaped eyes and striking, aquiline profile, Jacqueline appears in myriad ways in Picasso’s late work, her presence infusing every aspect of his art. A t.mes less monochrome depiction of Picasso’s last muse, Femme dans un fauteuil. Buste was executed on 28 April 1962. The motif of a woman seated in an armchair was one of the artist’s abiding subjects and he adapted his painterly style to suit each woman with his customary innovative flair. The present work is a compelling precursor to the series of seated portraits inspired by Jacqueline which Picasso completed towards the end of the same year.

In Femme dans un fauteuil. Buste, Picasso has depicted Jacqueline as an all-seeing classical beauty; her demeanor is seignorial, powerful and calm. Sitting on a throne-like chair, she emanates her position as the undisputed mistress of Notre-Dame-de-Vie, the spacious farmhouse set on the hillside of Mougins where the couple had moved in June of 1961, three months after their wedding. This would be Picasso and Jacqueline’s home for the rest of the artist’s life, as well as the backdrop for the explosion of creativity that distinguishes the final two decades of his prodigious career.

Picasso met the twenty-six-year-old Jacqueline in the summer of 1952 when he was seventy-two years old. She was working as a sales assistant at the Madoura ceramic studio in Vallauris, where the artist frequently worked. At the t.mes , Picasso was still involved with François Gilot, living with her and their two young children, Claude and Paloma, in their home near Vallauris. Their relationship, however, had been slowly deteriorating and by September the following year, their chapter ended with Gilot returning to Paris. By 1954, Picasso was living with Jacqueline and her unmistakable features started to appear in his art in the summer of that year.

For the rest of Picasso’s life, Jacqueline was an unfailing presence. After the death of his first wife, Olga, the pair finally married in 1961 in a ceremony that included only two witnesses: the artist’s lawyer and cleaner. Jacqueline was loyal, calm and besotted; her unflappable support and willingness to sacrifice herself on the altar of Picasso’s ego won the artist’s heart. Jacqueline said that throughout their lives together she never left Picasso’s side for more than a few hours at a t.mes . As William Rubin has noted: “Jacqueline’s understated, gentle, and loving personality combined with her unconditional commitment to (Picasso) provided an emotionally stable life and a dependable foyer over a longer period of t.mes than he had ever before enjoyed.” (Exh. Cat. Pace Gallery, New York, Picasso & Jacqueline, The Evolution of Style, 2014-15, p. 190)

Painting in black and white is a thread that runs through the history and practice of art, with artists long exploring the psychological, emotional and spiritual effects engendered by the monochromatic lens. Without the distraction of extraneous color, the viewer is encouraged to focus on a particular subject or technique unabated. From Velásquez to Ingres (see fig. 1), artists have worked en grisaille as a means of demonstrating the intellectual power of painting. Picasso was a passionate and knowledgeable student of Western European painting and he produced works intended to initiate a dialogue with his artistic predecessors.

Throughout Picasso’s storied career, select masterpieces were executed in a palette of black, white and gray, most notably his monumental Guernica from 1937. Picasso seemed to return to this palette when he felt he had achieved the “ultimate” expression of a certain idea. Moreover, he kept his most important portraits of his lovers in this unique chromatic scheme, exemplified by the present work. The power of Femme dans un fauteuil. Buste is enhanced by the painting’s impressive size, which reaches over a meter in height.

David Sylvester describes the reciprocal nature of Picasso’s monochrome works: “The need to isolate often governs Picasso’s use of color. At different t.mes s he isolates blue, pink, black-and-white, and so on. This has both a positive and a negative aspect. The positive is the assertion of the chosen color: it’s often said that Velázquez and Goya made a color of black; Picasso’s black-and-white pictures isolate this strain in the Spanish tradition. The negative aspect is that absence of variety in the color helps to isolate qualities of form” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Picasso Black and White, 2012, p. 23).

In his analysis of the human head, Picasso has often been tempted to split its unity. In the case of the present work, he presents Jacqueline’s face head-on, yet renders her eyes, nose and mouth in irregular positions, and her hair, pulled back in a bun, protrudes out to the side. The qualities of form and the distortion of the face are particularly important in Picasso’s female portraits—a recurring trope that has its basis in Picasso’s cubist experiments of 1910. Jacqueline’s bust and facial elements come together as a whole in the present work due to Picasso’s remarkable ability to convey tonal range. This sculptural three-dimensionality found an equivalence in the paper cut outs and sheet.mes tal portrait heads of Jacqueline that he was creating contemporaneously.

According to Edward Quinn, whose photographs document Picasso’s studio work in the early 1960s, Jacqueline was the driving force behind the artist’s ceaseless production: “His close friends agree that Jacqueline’s presence and attention were mainly responsible for Picasso having remained so active until his death. His outlook on life and his enthusiasm for work helped him defy old age and stay young in mind, and even in body. He liked to be with younger people, and his ‘eternal youth’ coupled with Jacqueline’s adaptability, made the great difference between their ages unimportant” (Edward Quinn and Pierre Daix, The Private Picasso, New York, 1987, p. 291).

Never before seen at auction, Femme dans un fauteuil. Buste documents the artist’s mastery of line and form and asserts Picasso’s rightful place among the greatest masters of art history.