Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery)

Pablo Picasso, summer 1907

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About This Work

This study isolates a sleeping woman’s head and turns repose into a compact experiment in contour, mass, and stylization. Rather than describe a fully furnished setting, Picasso concentrates attention on the closed eyes, broad facial planes, and the way the figure seems to emerge from the surrounding surface. The contained format and unfinished-study quality invite viewers to see the painting as a record of artistic decision-making. Sleep becomes a formal device: it permits stillness, simplification, and distance from conventional portrait psychology. Sleep allows the figure to be presented as inward and unguarded. The study's meaning comes from its attention to repose, private bodily presence, and the translation of a living model into preparatory form.

MoMA identifies the work as Paris, summer 1907, oil on canvas, and records it as object 278.1983. It was made in the same intense period as Picasso’s preparations for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, when he was testing how the body could be rebuilt through simplified planes and forceful outlines. The study’s significance lies in its transitional status. It preserves an experimental vocabulary that would soon make the female figure a central site for Picasso’s challenge to inherited ideas of beauty, space, and representation. The documented holding collection is Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; its direct institutional object record (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79376) is retained as the factual source for the catalog entry and its provenance trail.

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