In August 1948 Picasso left for Poland with Paul Éluard to attend the World Congress of Intellectuals. Greeted with great enthusiasm as the guest of honour at the event in Wrocław, he also spent two weeks visiting Warsaw and Kracow. During this journey, which heenjoyed very much and for which he had taken an airplane for the first time, Picasso bought an elaborately embroidered leather and sheep's wool coat as a gift for his lover and muse at the time, the French artist Françoise Gilot. Their passionate and stormy relationship had begun in 1944 and it almost coincided with his return to lithography in 1945, which resulted in a fruitful collaboration with Fernand Mourlot and the master lithographers at his workshop.
In November that year, Françoise posed in the Polish coat, sitting on an antique armchair in the artist's studio. She became the subject of the series Femme au Fauteuil ('Armchair Woman'), one of the highpoints of Picasso's lithographic oeuvre. The formal pose of the sitter recall the ancestral portraits of the classical Chinese and Renaissance portraiture. Over many states and versions, Picasso altered the style of the image from realism to abstraction, while maintaining the distinct refences to 16th century painting, especially Cranach.
The original intention was to produce a complex five-colour lithograph, but it turned out to be a failed experiment. Instead of abandoning the project, Picasso worked on the five zinc plates as distinct images, each printed in a single colour. Most of the lithographs realised with Mourlot were printed in black only, but in a nuanced range of tones from deep black to light grey and of remarkable luminosity. According to Henri Deschamps, the colour printer in Mourlot's team, garlic was added to the ink to great a particular sheen and saturation.
Picasso began to work on each plate separately - reworking some plates, transferring and continuing to rework others. The final result was his most ambitious lithograph, known in several experimental variations, each of which expresses Françoise's 'freshness and restless vitality' (Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, 1999, p. 136).