Identified by Maya Widmaier-Picasso as a portrait of her mother Marie-Thérèse Walter, Femme en buste (Marie-Thérèse), January 1939, was executed at a time when Pablo Picasso frequently portayed two of his muses: Marie-Thérèse, his lover since 1927, and Dora Maar, a French painter and poet who had become his new mistress in the latter half of the 1930s. Though proliferating pictures of Picasso’s two primary models often converged during this period, a myriad of pencil studies of Marie-Thérèse, as well as the artist’s Femme alongée lisant from 1939, Musée Picasso, Paris, have helped in identifying the subject matter of the present work, as well as its precise date of execution. Formerly in the collection of the artist Julian Schnabel, Femme en buste (Marie-Thérèse) is a quintessential example of Picasso’s distinctive approach to portraiture, increasingly vested with deformation, physical dislocations and drastic abstraction, as a result of his continued interest in the Surrealist milieu. It furthermore allows a peek into the artist’s particular sensitivity towards Marie-Thérèse, whom he consistently portrayed as a luminous presence.

A delectable image exuding lyrical calm and beauty, Femme en buste (Marie-Thérèse) is emblematic of Picasso’s vision of Marie-Thérèse. As opposed to Dora, whom he painted with the dark and ominous traits that characterized her high wit and heated temper, Marie-Thérèse was always illustrated as a pristine beauty, whose pale features and primeval blonde locks echoed her composed countenance. Residing in the same home and sharing a family with the artist since 1934, Marie-Thérèse symbolized peacefulness, stability and quiet domesticity, as evidenced in the present work’s gentle forms and unthreatening abstraction. "Dora would be the public companion, Marie-Thérèse and Maya continued to incarnate private life” Pierre Daix wrote. “Painting would be shared between them... Each woman would epitomize a particular facet of a period rich in increasingly dramatic repercussions" (Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 239).