Picasso’s Portrait de Femme II (1955) condenses a woman’s profile into a sequence of chiselled planes and velvety shadows, as if the image were hewn from charcoal and light. Broad, black passages anchor the cheek, jaw, and hair, while quick cross-hatching and razor-clean contour lines snap the features into a taut, Cubist alignment. The eye reads as an ovoid wedge, the nose a stacked column, the mouth a compact hinge—each element simplified to its structural essence.

The lithographic surface preserves the immediacy of drawing: pressure shifts are audible in the grain, and the crayon’s scuff and lift record the speed of the hand. A date notation at the upper left heightens this sense of a single concentrated session, catching the sitter at the intersection of intimacy and archetype. Though the head fills the page, the wide margins and luminous Arches wove support give the figure air, letting the black passages breathe against the paper’s soft tooth.

Made during the artist’s vigorous mid-1950s engagement with lithography in Paris, the sheet shows Picasso renewing Cubism’s language with a stripped, monumental economy. Planes interlock without fuss; light is not described but engineered, toggling between carved shadow and blank paper. The result is both portrait and emblem: a woman particular enough to feel close, yet abstracted into enduring volumes and rhythms. It is this duality—sensuous mark-making fused to lucid construction—that makes the work such a concise statement of Picasso’s mature graphic power.
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