Dated and numbered “5.12.50. XXVIII” lower left.

From 1935 to 1952, Pablo Picasso and the French poet Paul Éluard experienced a particularly fruitful period of exchange. In 1951, their collaboration resulted in a book entitled “The Face of Peace”..
On December 5, 1950, Picasso executed a series of 29 variations associating the dove, symbol of peace, with a female face, that of Françoise Gilot.
The drawing we are presenting, “Variation XXVIII”, is the most accomplished.
The woman whose face is represented full-frontal and with eyes wide open, looks straight ahead, towards “the horizon of all”. Her radiance, emblem of a new clarity, mixes with that of a sun which “dissolves the shadows”.