This powerful drawing is one of an extensive series of portraits of Picasso’s partner Fernande Olivier, whom he met in Paris in 1904. Earlier portraits reveal her recognizable features, though Picasso’s interest soon moved on to a more audacious form of primitivism, especially after he saw an exhibition of Iberian art from Osuna that opened at the Louvre in the spring of 1906. After seeing these works, Picasso famously abstracted Gertrude Stein’s physiognomy in his 1906 portrait of her. Picasso’s friends, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, were especially enthusiastic admirers of what they called “barbaric art,” and Apollinaire and Picasso began to collect African art. For Picasso, this was the necessary route to the birth of Cubism, a movement that transformed modern art by taking radical simplification much further, as a new and highly subversive language.