This elegant and radical portrait is outstanding within the series of postwar paintings Picasso produced of his lover and artistic companion, Françoise Gilot. Three years after they first met in 1943 they embarked on a passionate decade-long love affair - the resulting images of Gilot now occupy an important and central role within the iconography of Picasso’s happier post-war period.
Significantly, the entire conception of Femme en bleu assise dans un fauteuil reflects a remarkable encounter with Picasso’s great rival and friend, Henri Matisse, who declared when he first met Françoise that Picasso should portray her with a ‘pale blue body and leaf-green hair’.
Picasso adopted this leaf-green element in the face and neck of the sitter in the present work - indeed, a leaf motif defines Françoise’s forehead - with the addition of a glorious halo of floral, organic motifs in and around her face and hair which immediately relate to Matisse’s ‘cut paper’ compositions of the late 1940s. Combined with the high contrast black and yellow palette, set off against her vivid cobalt-blue dress and amethyst shadows, Picasso’s overall composition of the present work is a bold and intensely passionate portrayal of Gilot.
Picasso’s stylistic dialogue with Matisse in the postwar years is essential to understanding the present painting. When Matisse discovered the art of cut paper he described the technique as ‘drawing with scissors’. He boldly sliced through sheets of paper in long, sinuous lines producing elegant, minimal and immediately appealing artworks.
In his later years, Matisse’s health gradually deteriorated. He often had to spend prolonged periods of time on bed rest, or in a wheelchair. Although oil painting in bed would present a challenge, cutting out paper was a technique that could be done virtually anywhere, even when lying down. This technique meant even when he was struggling to stand, he could still exercise the incredible creativity of his mind.

Picasso and Gilot regularly visited the elderly Matisse at Vence and at Nice-Cimiez, and Picasso was well aware of Gilot’s longstanding admiration of his old friend, as well as her frequent exchange of letters and drawings. Painted just five years before Matisse’s death, Femme en bleu assise dans un fauteuil is a testimony not simply to the creative energy and passion between Gilot and Picasso, but significantly it is a stunning testimony to the stylistic influence of Matisse over Picasso and vice versa: the culmination of their long term friendship, their rivalry and ultimately their admiration for each other. Picasso once said, ’If I were not making the paintings I make, I would paint like Matisse,’ and Matisse said much the same about Picasso.1
We see Matisse’s lexicon of flowers, leaves and simplified formal patterns of his pioneering cut paper style reflected vividly throughout Picasso’s portraiture of this period, but perhaps none more so than Femme en Blue...; however rather than scissoring paper he transposes ideas formed from his obsession with lithography, using the canvas’s white ground much as a lithographer.

The leaf and floral motifs are also recalled in a series of Picasso’s images from 1946 of La femme-fleur (Françoise), where the sitter’s hair is represented by oval and ellipsoid leaves. The present work adopts much the same severe, classical definition of Françoise’s lyrical beauty: an ovoid face; a rectilinear nose; exactly arched eyebrows and lips. The representation of the crowned hair often described as a ‘kidney-bean’ pattern is also seemingly suggestive of the ivy wreath worn by the sitter in a portrait photograph of the couple taken in 1952 by Robert Doisneau (below).
Painted just one month before the birth of the couple’s daughter, Paloma on 19th April, 1949, the choice of cobalt or lapis blue for the sitter’s dress in Femme en bleu, may well allude to the colour associated with the virgin Mary; ‘Marian’ blue; the portrait was, notably, executed just two days before the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating Mary.
Femme en bleu might also be read not simply as dialogue between perhaps the two greatest voices in painting from the twentieth century - Picasso and Matisse - with Picasso adopting the floral imagery of his rival but supplanting cut-outs for lithographic negative and positive - but also a testimony to the feeling between the artist and his muse, heralding the birth of their daughter. And, completing the triangle, the paintings from this period by Gilot herself have a similarly reductive palette and abstracted language.
Critically, Femme en bleu belongs to a
series that has been comparatively overlooked within the artist’s œuvre. The reasons for this were detailed with the exhibition of the work in a major retrospective of the artist’s portraiture in New York and Paris, where Picasso’s postwar paintings were remarked as follows:
‘Although the public, political side of Picasso’s art made the best news, it was not his primary achievement during the postwar decade. It is Picasso’s still lifes, portraits, and figure paintings that constitute his major work of these years. Yet because Picasso did not put the majority up for sale at the time, so that they later passed on to heirs who mostly wished to retain them [as with this work], many of these paintings – particularly the portraits – are relatively little known among art historians and even less by general audiences. Moreover, the portraits of Françoise and their children, Claude and Paloma, not only constitute a remarkable group of private images, they also frequently infuse the more public pictures with a welcome element of playfulness and renew a dialogue with past art that would increasingly propel Picasso’s later career.’
The singularity of this portrait therefore consists both in it being a junction between two giants of twentieth century painting, and in turn reflecting their intimacy with Gilot, and being salient as one of the most sublime and mesmerising works of Picasso’s postwar career.