Pablo Picasso’s Portrait de Femme à la Fraise et au Chapeau, 1962, a linocut printed in seven colors on Arches wove paper. Signed by the artist, this work is a striking example of Picasso’s radical mastery of the linocut process during the early 1960s, a period in which he reinvented the medium to achieve the complexity and richness usually reserved for painting.

The portrait presents a female figure whose face is fractured into vivid planes of color—yellow, blue, gray, and black—outlined in confident, rhythmic lines. The sitter’s features are doubled and rearranged, fusing multiple perspectives into a single image, a hallmark of Picasso’s lifelong engagement with Cubism. The lace-like ruff (fraise) encircling the face and the broad, stylized hat lend the composition both elegance and theatricality, while the decorative brown frame-like border pushes the work toward the realm of design and ornament.

Picasso’s chromatic choices heighten the sense of dissonance and harmony at once: the bright yellow suggests vitality and warmth, the cooler blue evokes calm detachment, while the metallic gray grounds the figure in monumentality.

This work exemplifies Picasso’s revolutionary approach to linocut printing, a medium he embraced in the late 1950s while working in Vallauris with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra. Rather than using multiple blocks for each color, Picasso devised the reduction linocut method—successively carving away a single block to apply different layers of color. This process was irreversible and demanded extraordinary precision and foresight, as each stage destroyed part of the block.

Portrait de Femme à la Fraise et au Chapeau demonstrates the full sophistication of this technique, with seven distinct color layers combined into a bold, unified image.

The subject of the female portrait—transformed into a theatrical, near-mythical presence—connects to Picasso’s enduring fascination with women as muses and embodiments of creative energy. Here, the ruff and hat suggest a Renaissance or baroque elegance, yet Picasso filters this through a modernist lens, flattening and fragmenting the image into pure shape, color, and line.

By the early 1960s, Picasso had already secured his place as the defining artist of the 20th century, yet works like this reaffirm his restless innovation. In reinventing the centuries-old technique of linocut, he turned what was traditionally seen as a craft or utilitarian process into a vehicle for high art and radical experimentation.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait de Femme à la Fraise et au Chapeau, 1962. Linocut printed in seven colors on Arches paper. Signed in pencil by the artist. An exceptional example of Picasso’s reduction linocut technique, this portrait exemplifies his mastery of color, line, and form, combining theatrical elegance with modernist fragmentation.