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"Autoportrait à la voilette (Self-Portrait with a Veil)" by Juliette Roche (French) - Oil on cardboard / c. 1953 - Musée Estrine (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France) #WomenInArt #JulietteRoche #Roche #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #artText #BlueskyArt #SelfPortrait #MuseeEstrine #MuséeEstrine
Painted around 1953, this is French artist Juliette Roche’s final self-portrait, made as she mourned the death of her husband, the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes. A widow’s veil signals grief, yet an unexpected yellow background and a steady, frontal gaze refuse a purely somber image. They echo the “piquant irony” that critics had noticed in her early Paris years. She presents herself as an older light-skinned woman facing us head-on, shown from the bust up against a flat, luminous yellow backdrop. Her shoulders are squared and still, the figure simply blocked in so that all attention rests on her face and a delicate mourning veil that frames it. The transparent netting softens her forehead and eyes, casting faint shadows across fine wrinkles and a gently slackened jaw. Her grey-brown hair is tucked away, her precisely-painted red lips closed in an almost-smile that hovers between fatigue, composure, and wry amusement. The brushwork is economical yet precise, with small modulations of pinks, greys, and cool shadows modeling the aging skin, while the bold yellow field behind her turns this intimate self-portrait into a quietly radiant, contemporary icon of an older woman looking straight back at us. Trained at the Académie Ranson and shaped by the Nabis, Cubist circles, and Dada experiments in New York with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Roche had long used self-portraiture to assert herself not as “the artist at work” but as a thinking, modern woman. Here, in late life at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, after founding the Moly-Sabata artists’ community and helping sustain avant-garde networks, she paints herself one last time ... veiled yet vividly present ... claiming space for an older female artist whose creativity, independence, and quiet humor persist even in mourning.
November 26, 2025 at 10:00 PM