Picasso's model and companion from 1905 to 1912, the presiding figure of his Bateau-Lavoir years in Montmartre. Picasso's 1909 bronze Head of a Woman is her face taken apart into Cubist planes; she later wrote two memoirs of that time.
Born Amélie Lang in Paris in 1881, Fernande Olivier met Picasso in Montmartre in 1904 and lived with him from 1905 to 1912, through the years when he moved from the Blue and Rose periods into Cubism. She is the woman in a long run of his work of the period, including the 1909 bronze Head of a Woman in our catalog, where her features are still legible under the faceting.
She wrote about those years twice, in Picasso et ses amis (1933) and in memoirs published in full only after her death. They are among the closest first-hand accounts of the Bateau-Lavoir circle before any of them were famous, and a principal source for what the early Cubist years in Montmartre were actually like. She died in 1966.
Sculpture · Cubism
Picasso's 1909 portrait of Fernande Olivier, modeled in clay as interlocking ridges, hollows, and facets. Often identified as his first fully Cubist sculpture, it tests how several implied viewpoints can occupy one solid head.
Art movement · 1907–1914
Picasso's model and companion through the Bateau-Lavoir years, 1905–1912, when Cubism took shape in the studios there. She later wrote the milieu's insider memoir, Picasso et ses amis.
Associated with · 1905–1912
Picasso's model and companion through the Bateau-Lavoir years, 1905–1912, when Cubism took shape in the studios there. She later wrote the milieu's insider memoir, Picasso et ses amis.
Depicted in · 1909
Picasso modelled the head from Fernande Olivier, his companion through the Bateau-Lavoir years. Her features stay legible under the Cubist faceting.