Pablo Picasso

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of linocuts made by Pablo Picasso between 1959 and 1963.

Throughout his life, Picasso restlessly explored the medium of the print, employing many techniques including lithography, etching, drypoint, and monotype. By the late 1950s he was spending most of his time in the south of France and the distance between him and his Parisian printers became increasingly difficult for smooth production. Increasingly he turned his attention to linocut printing, a very direct way of working whereby a design is cut into a sheet of linoleum using a knife, chisel, or gouge. His first linocut, Toros en Vallauris (1954), was a simple black-and-white print, but by 1959 he was using the technique as a complete means of expression, becoming totally absorbed in the process and his daily collaboration with the local printer Hidalgo Arnera.

The time-consuming production of Picasso’s first traditional color linocut, The Portrait of a Girl after Cranach (1958), prompted him to develop a new, simpler approach to the technique. Rather than using a separate linoleum block for each color, he began re-cutting the same block. He would progressively cut and reprint, depending on the number of colors he wanted in each linocut. Between 1959 and 1962 Picasso made about a hundred linocuts using this new approach. Subjects ranged from Jacqueline Roque, his muse, wife, and constant companion, in the gaily colored Portrait de Jacqueline au chapeau de paille multicolore to old master portraits such as the series Portrait d’homme à la fraise (Variation d’après el Greco), in which Picasso pays homage to El Greco, retaining the original composition of his predecessor’s self-portrait while variously accentuating facial features and clothes to assert his own presence in the work.

In 1963, he briefly experimented with another unconventional linocut technique, typified by L’Etreinte 1 (Embrace), which depicts a man and woman locked in tumultuous embrace. This technique involved printing a linocut in cream ink onto white paper, and then painting the same sheet of paper with black China ink. The paper was then rinsed in the shower, which Picasso claimed to have enjoyed doing himself. The black ink was absorbed into the unprinted areas, but otherwise repelled by the greasy cream ink. This technique produced an image that looks as painted as printed.