At the time, his relationship with his wife, former Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, was becoming increasingly tense. Characteristically domineering, Picasso felt especially excited by Walter’s receptiveness and curiosity, and in turn, Marie-Thérèse was enthusiastic to serve as Picasso’s model. For more than a decade, she would be a prominent face in many of his works, if anonymous until 1932, notably as a terrified figure in his war-themed masterwork Guernica (1937).

Picasso’s growing dissatisfaction with Olga and his intense passion for Marie-Thérèse were drawn into the forms and figures seen in his work during this time. Femme dans un fauteuil marked the genesis of this formal expression, which is fraught with sexual undertones and the rounded biomorphic forms that would be inextricably linked to Marie-Thérèse from this point on, while his portrayals of Olga grew increasingly fearsome, angular and distorted. The sideways teeth-bearing visage in the present work would come to symbolize Olga in the ensuing years.

Many of Picasso’s biographers have remarked that Marie-Thérèse and Femme dans un fauteuil unleashed a dormant force within the artist. This sexually charged energy fueled the creation of scores of paintings and sculptures involving Marie-Thérèse until a new muse, Dora Maar, appeared around 1935.

Femme dans un fauteuil remained in the artist’s collection until 1955 and was exhibited at some of Picasso’s most important museum shows, including at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1939 retrospective of the artist’s work when Guernica was first exhibited in the USA, and is now a centrepiece of the Landau Fine Art Collection.