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Picasso created many images showing Jacqueline Roque wearing a hat. She was his last wife, the most depicted of his paramours. An exact explanation as to why remains unknown, but most art historians theorize that Roque’s devotion to her husband’s career created a near-perfect muse-artist dynamic. She embraced his dominant personality and savored being by his side or on his canvas. It was almost as though being his partner was her destiny. But why the hats?
Such portraiture was extremely popular at the turn-of-the-century, especially in Paris. The recent Industrial Revolution made fashion more readily available and accessible to the lower classes, including the women socializing in artists’ circles who would sit as models.* There was a simultaneous progression of social values, allowing young women to have more public lives so wealthier families would commission portraits to publicize them. This Belle Epoque as it became known was underway when Picasso arrived in Paris and provided him with his first taste of the city.
Flash forward to the early 1960s, when Picasso and Roque were living on the southern coast of France. Though his creative drive had not wavered, Picasso’s lifestyle and inspirations had greatly changed in his old age. Yet, here we glimpse a nostalgia, a celebration of the era when he was a young man living a wildly bohemian life in Paris. With this linocut, Picasso combines the past and present in a fusion that celebrates his legacy. The delicate divisions of Roque’s face resemble his early Cubist tendences while the masterful sense of detail could have only been rendered by someone with the decades of experiences he possessed. The paneling effect here is also reminiscent of a stained glass window or a carved wooden relief. While there is a purposeful flatness here, Picasso also uses the contrast of black and tan to draw the viewer in and create an unconventional play on light and shadow. It’s almost as though Roque has become fully unified with the two-dimensional plane, forever immortalizing her as the ultimate woman of the print.
Courtesy of John Szoke Gallery.