Woman Plaiting Her Hair

Woman Plaiting Her Hair is a seminal oil on canvas painting created by Pablo Picasso in 1906. Executed during the crucial developmental phase in Paris, late summer or fall 1906, this work reflects the Spanish artist’s decisive move away from the delicate, melancholic styles of the Blue and Rose Periods toward a more monumental and materially grounded aesthetic. This period marked Picasso’s intense engagement with primitive and Iberian sculptural forms, which provided the foundational structural vocabulary for his rapid progression toward Cubism. While the painting is temporally anchored in the early 20th-century avant-garde, its direct, frontal subject matter and sculptural rendering suggest a profound interest in formal simplicity and mass.

The subject, a lone figure absorbed in the intimate task of plaiting her hair, is rendered with bold, simplified planes and a distinct lack of atmospheric depth. Picasso utilized warm earth tones and heavy contour lines, which deliberately recall the rough-hewn quality of archaic Iberian sculpture and early Romanesque art. This emphasis on volume, solidity, and simplified features represents a conscious break from traditional Western ideals of proportion. The woman's mask-like face and heavy-lidded eyes clearly demonstrate Picasso’s deep study of non-Western artifacts and Iberian imagery, which were the key stylistic influences guiding him during this transitional moment. The Spanish painter’s formal experiments with geometry and mass in depicting the human body directly foreshadow the fractured planes that would characterize the revolutionary style he would pioneer shortly thereafter.

This canvas is critical for understanding the genesis of modern art, illustrating the complexity of the figure just before its complete abstraction in works like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The work is prominently held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where it serves as a central example of the artist’s pivotal 1906 transition. Although restricted within museum archives, high-quality art prints and reproductions often allow wider access for scholars and enthusiasts to study this crucial phase of Picasso’s career.