"Picasso's female portraits are like a diary of his life and love, and it is so exciting to be able to turn to Françoise Gilot's chapter. This 1953 work is a magnificent culmination of their relationship and its impact on Picasso's art - bringing together Cubist, sculptural and graphic elements with a painterly motif and the green palette that the artist associated with Françoise."
Remarkably rare within the artist's exhaustive and prolific oeuvre, Seated Woman in Green Costume belongs to a group of portraits Picasso created in the late winter of 1952 and the early spring of 1953 that depict Gilot during the couple's time living with their two children, Claude and Paloma, at the villa La Galloise in Vallauris, France. While Picasso produced an impressive body of work testifying to the joy he experienced with Gilot and their children, this mesmerizing painting reflects the tensions between the two artists in this late stage of their relationship, as well as Picasso's continued stylistic versatility.
In Seated Woman in Green Costume, Picasso employs two painterly tropes often associated with his depictions of Gilot: the primacy of line and the color green. In the early years of their relationship, Picasso depicted Gilot as inherently linked with the natural world and this painting features the rich, vegetal green that evokes this idea, whilst incorporating a clear linear demarcation of form. The striking intensity of the work is achieved through Picasso's balance between monochrome passages and isolated segments of vibrant color. Through this fragmenting of the picture plane, Picasso develops the linear style with which his portraits of Gilot are often associated. Unlike the soft and fluid lines of earlier portrayals, this work retains an almost sculptural quality that prefigures his work with sheet metal.
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