£3,906
MODERN MADE: Modern & Post War Art, Design and Contemporary Ceramics & Crafts | 709
Auction: 28 April 2023 at 11:00 BST
silver, yellow metal, paper and gold leaf, from Ornaments for Woman With The Hair Net from the Picasso Series, ten hallmarked for London and stamped 925
Provenance
The artist, where acquired from by the present owner circa 2006.
Private Collection, UK.
Literature
Picasso's Ladies: Jewellery by Wendy Ramshaw, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 1998, cat. no. 9, seven of the hair ornaments illustrated.
Ramshaw's inspiration for the hair ornaments was taken from Picasso's Woman with the Hair Net lithograph (1949-56) that depicts the young painter, Francoise Gilot, who Picasso met in April 1943. Ramshaw noted 'Soon after this meeting, her features appear in several drawings. This lithograph was made in 1949 in the same year their daughter, Paloma, was born. The portrait shows a beautiful pale face, large eyes and, to either side of the head, dark loops of hair clearly contained within a hair net'.
In the publication Picasso Ladies it states that 12 works were made, but two of the works illustrated are not in this selection. It is likely that Ramshaw would have made more individual elements than would be required for her to make a final selection or further elements might have had to be made because of damage or further refinement of the composition over time (especially given that the full collection would have been exhibited on three separate occasions in London, New York and Germany). This might account for this anomaly with the work illustrated in the literature.