Picasso on Paper | Posters and Prints

Of the thousands of prints that he created in his lifetime, Picasso is known to have made approximately 150 linocuts. 100 of those were made between 1959- 1962, during the time he was living in Vauvenargues and Mougins in the South of France. This particular collection of 45 linocuts were printed from blocks that were recarved at 42% of the size of Picasso’s larger works from the late 1950s and early 60s. This extraordinary achievement was overseen by Picasso in collaboration with the Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris and the end result was entitled Picasso Linogravures, published in 1962 by Éditions Cercle d’Art in Paris and Harry Abrams in New York. Showcasing the artist’s inventiveness with the medium, from line drawing and complex multicolour prints to textural marks never before seen in lino printing, Picasso Linogravure helped to elevate the humble status of the linocut as an art form. One of the highlights in the series, Portrait of a Woman, after Lucas Cranach, is particularly important in the development of Picasso’s approach to the medium. Picasso was known for re-imagining the work of the Old Masters and was often inspired simply by reproductions of works in books. In this case, his dealer Henry Kahnweiler had sent him a postcard of Cranach the Younger’s Portrait of a Woman, and this provided the inspiration for this print. Picasso first attempted this print in two colours but was determined to create a more complex and colourful image and eventually resorted to five different blocks printed in black, red, green, yellow, brown, and blue. This was Picasso’s most ambitious linocut to date and he created multiple variations and proofs to get to the desired result. Picasso was keen to print in colours, enjoying the expressiveness and ease of carving lino, as well as the resulting solid areas of dense, flat colour. However, the process of colour printing with lino in layers was laborious, requiring a new block to be carved for each colour and each block to be perfectly registered for each layer. Picasso soon abandoned this way of working and invented ‘reduction printing’ or the ‘suicide cut ‘- a method still used by artists today as a more efficient way of printing many colours successively from one block. There is no room for error with this method, as there is only one opportunity to print each layer from the block before it is cut away, however it eliminates the need to register each part of the design with a different block for each colour. The subject matter in this series is typical of Picasso’s personal mythology including bullfights, nudes, musicians and bacchanalia. Links between the themes in these prints can be made with Picasso’s earlier works such as the Antibes Murals of 1946 however, they are uniquely portrayed here in this wonderful form of printmaking which Picasso made his own, in a relatively short period of furious experimentation and innovation. Compared with the several thousand etchings or over eight hundred lithographs Picasso produced, his linocuts occupy a relatively small place in his graphic canon but the impact of this rarer linocut work and its influence on printmakers is still widely felt today. Picasso’s larger linocuts currently sell from £6,000 to over £100,000, making these smaller versions an affordable way of enjoying Picasso’s astonishing ingenuity with printmaking in your own home. Grace Hailstone

Picasso began creating exhibition posters in 1948, when he was in his late sixties, having already turned his hand to myriad artforms in his long career to date. Over the following twenty years, he produced in the region of 70 poster designs in total. In Vallauris, the town near the Cote d’Azur where he lived from 1948-54, Picasso made posters and accompanying graphics for the annual Ceramics exhibitions where he showed his own work made in local potteries. Here, he worked with the printmaker Hidalgo Arnéra, who introduced him to the technique of linocutting and helped him to print his posters using a hand press. Using motifs from ancient mythology printed in earthy colours, Picasso intended to convey a sense of a simple, happy life in harmony with nature. The posters Picasso printed in Vallauris helped boost the sales of his ceramics and small editions and in turn helped the town’s struggling economy after the war. Although he made many linocuts, the majority of Picasso’s posters are lithographs. Picasso’s designs were of course unconventional, in handling of both image and text, making them highly desirable collectors’ items today. We have one original lithographic poster for sale here, along with a selection of offset lithographic posters, featuring stunning reproductions of Picasso’s works, from galleries, museum collections, Vallauris and the famed lithographic print workshop in Paris, Atelier Mourlot. Lithography was enjoying a resurgence as a medium for artists in post war France and England and Picasso was key in experimenting with this avenue of expression, along with exponents such as Chagall, Miró, Léger and Braque. The original Galerie Louise Leiris lithograph, designed by Picasso for a show of his paintings in 1957 is an example of a poster made by the artist for smaller cultural institutions he chose to support and in this case, with whom he was closely linked. The Galerie Louise Leiris was Picasso’s gallery and dealer in Paris for many years, originally run by the artist’s friend, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, before he haned over to his daughter Louise in 1940. We have a few beautiful examples of offset lithographic posters in our selection from solo Picasso exhibitions of prints, drawings and paintings that the gallery produced. The selection of posters of Atelier Mourlot exhibitions of lithographs by Picasso from the Mourlot collection also attest to fascinating aspects of Picasso’s life and career, one example being Flying Dove in Rainbow. The dove became an important symbol for Picasso in his poster art from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. Commissioned by the French Communist party in 1948 to design a poster for the first World Peace Congress in Paris, Picasso went on to create a whole series of ‘Peace Posters’ which were published internationally for Peace Congress events across several European countries. Some of the museum posters in this show are of great interest as collectors’ items for their wider historical significance. The Berlin Nationalgalerie poster, for example, bold in prominent black, yellow and red, features Picasso’s Buste de Femme (Jacqueline) from 1959. This painting was a significant acquisition by the museum, the first to enter their collection after World War Two and this poster celebrates the acquisition and marks this moment in history. Like this poster, many of the offset lithographs in this selection attest to Picasso’s prodigious output as an artist across all media and serve as records of historic moments, exhibitions and shows that cumulatively added to the legacy that is Picasso today. After, all the fact that Picasso himself devoted his time and effort to the poster medium indicates that this a body of work worthy of attention and admiration and would make a fine addition to any private collection. Grace Hailston