Created in 1939 at the height of Picasso’s mature Cubist language, Tête de Femme III: Portrait of Dora Maar exemplifies the artist’s intense psychological and formal experimentation on the eve of the Second World War. Picasso’s portraits of Dora from this period often operate as compressed theatres of emotion, where the fractured planes and doubled features reflect both the sitter’s inner tension and the turbulent political climate surrounding them. Here, the exaggerated architecture of the face—elongated nose, dislocated eyes, sharply modelled cheekbones—demonstrates Picasso’s ongoing pursuit of a portraiture liberated from naturalistic constraint, a continuation of the Cubist dismantling of surface reality in favour of deeper expressive truth.

The composition is built through a dense network of line and colour. Fine, incised marks animate the skin, creating a textured field in which psychological complexity appears almost etched into the surface. The boldly rendered eyes, stretched horizontally, anchor the portrait with a penetrating intensity, while the dark sweep of Dora’s hair provides a counterweight of rhythm and shadow. Picasso’s use of colour is both strategic and emotive: earthy reds and ochres mingle with bruised greens and greys, creating an atmosphere of contained volatility that aligns with his depictions of Dora as both muse and emotional cipher.

The treatment of the background—structured yet destabilised by a hatched, woven texture—reinforces the sense of interior unrest, situating the figure between solidity and dissolution. The striped garment adds a final layer of pictorial tension, its vertical rhythms cutting against the diagonals of the face and amplifying the portrait’s dynamic instability.

Tête de Femme III stands as a compelling testament to Picasso’s late-1930s portraiture, where Cubist fragmentation becomes a vehicle for psychological excavation. In this work, Dora Maar is not merely depicted but reinterpreted through a lens that merges personal intimacy, formal innovation, and the broader anxieties of an era. For more information on Tête de Femme III: Portrait of Dora Maar or to buy