ArtBohemia

PICASSO: GRAPHIC MAGICIAN
PRINTS FROM THE NORTON SIMON MUSEUM
Press Release
The exhibition Picasso: Graphic Magician focuses on the four major periods of Picasso's long and productive printmaking career. The prints have been lent by the Norton Simon Museum, whose holdings are of exceptional depth, with more than seven hundred prints.
Although Picasso's early interest in printmaking was only sporadic, by the 1930s he attained a fluidity in etching evident in his illustrations to classic texts by Ovid and Balzac, and the major series of one hundred prints, Suite Vollard. In this last sequence, scenes of a sculptor at work in his studio form the dominant motif, which is then altered by the entry of a Minotaur.
Lithographs, especially those of the late 1940s, form the second major group. At the end of the Second World War at the Atelier Mourlot in Paris, Picasso experimented with this technique new to him. Defying conventional approaches, Picasso achieved extraordinary effects. Among the most complex subjects are his reinterpretations of works by Lucas Cranach and Eugène Delacroix. Portraiture is a significant component late in this period, with images of Françoise Gilot followed by those of Jacqueline Roque.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Picasso was working in the south of France and engaged in making ceramics, he began to make linocuts. Again he subverted the accepted technique (of printing each color from a separate block) by reworking the same block with results that are exuberant and intensely colorful.
During the late 1960s, in the last chapter of his printmaking, Picasso returned to the intaglio technique, with which he felt the greatest affinity. In marked contrast to the oversize and public nature of the linocuts, his final etchings, which include Suite 347, are direct and deeply experienced. Still inventive technically, this series of 1968 is an astonishing outpouring of 347 prints. References abound to earlier subjects from Balzac and Old Masters to Rembrandt and El Greco. The cast of characters include his parents, wives, and mistresses, who often appear as performers magically set in circus scenes. With irony and ribald humor, he reviewed his life, his failing powers, and his place in history.
Picasso and Printmaking
In Picasso's first extended printmaking statement the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard played a pivotal role, commissioning and publishing book illustrations and the major suite that bears his name. Vollard published many suites of original prints by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and others, as well as editions of bronze sculpture. However, his most important contribution was to a vital new form, the artist's book (livre d'artiste) in which the images, not the text, were of primary importance.
Picasso's major series of the 1930s was the group of one hundred prints known as Suite Vollard. Although the etchings span the decade, most are concentrated in the period of 1933 - 34, when Picasso was sculpting plaster heads of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter at his studio at Boisgeloup outside Paris.
The theme of a sculptor in his studio is the longest sequence in the series and runs to more than 40 compositions. Picasso characterized the sculptor variously--at times youthful or old, but most often mature and handsome, with a godlike head of curly hair and beard. The sculptures and models also change, including likenesses of Marie-Thérèse, Sarah (wife of the artist Gerald) Murphy, and a dark-haired model who closely resembles Françoise Gilot, Picasso's future mistress. In one scene Ingres's odalisques crowd the studio.
Later in the series a Minotaur enters and, after drinking with the sculptor and model, assumes the role of the sculptor. One of the most moving sequences is of a blind Minotaur, created in late 1934 - 35, which demonstrates Picasso's active experimentation with and combination of a variety of intaglio techniques.
Of Picasso's more than four hundred lithographs, his most original work dates to the initial period of creativity at Fernand Mourlot's workshop in Paris, which began in late 1945 and continued unabated into early 1946. At this time, Picasso often moved from working on one stone to another, altering and developing several compositions simultaneously. Norton Simon bought more than 228 lithographs in 1977 from the personal collection of Mourlot, including an unusual number of artist's proofs.
Notes on the Picasso's Techniques
The lithographs in the exhibition include many proofs and unique states. Many of the early lithographs were printed in special editions of 18 proofs reserved for the artist; others were annotated by Picasso: Bon à tirer (meaning ready to pull an edition); still others were unique proofs dedicated to Mourlot. Picasso worked many lithographs through a succession of states, meaning that as he worked on the composition, he pulled proofs to check his progress.
Picasso began to make linocuts while working in the south of France. After cutting several designs to serve as posters for exhibitions at Vallauris, he experimented further with the technique, working with the printer Hidalgo Arnéra and his workshop. Picasso's infatuation with the linocut lasted less than five years, but in his prodigal way he created some hundred prints. The appeal of the linocuts lies both in their spirited character and bold patterns, and in his unconventional use of the medium. The linocuts were published by the Galerie Louise Leiris in 1960 and 1963. In 1964 Norton Simon made his first major purchase of prints by Picasso, one hundred linocuts.
Picasso's first large linocut was after Lucas Cranach of 1958. It was printed from five blocks in the traditional chiaroscuro woodcut technique, in which each color was cut into a separate block. Tiring of this tedious approach, Picasso devised the radical solution of using a single block, which he reworked with a gouge, penknife, and various scrapers. After printing the preliminary design in one color, he recut and refined the composition, and printed the block in a second color, and later in a third.
When in his final years Picasso returned to printmaking, he was in a very different mood from that in which he created the exuberant and decorative linocuts of the early 1960s. Oppressed by his celebrity, the relative privacy of printmaking became particularly attractive. Suite 347 shows him in an introspective, at times confessional, frame of mind. Picasso began the series shortly after the death of his companion and friend Jaime Sabartés, and dedicated a set of proofs in his memory. Between March and early October 1968 Picasso created 347 etchings and aquatints (some days completing two or three plates), in collaboration with the printers Aldo and Piero Crommelynck at Mougins. Late in 1968 and 1969 the Galerie Louise Leiris exhibited and published them. The works had no titles when published because, as usual, Picasso had no use for them. The descriptive titles, now generally cited, are here used to help explain the subject.
Betsy G. Fryberger
Curator of the Exhibition
The exhibition was made possible by a generous gift from John and Jill Freidenrich.