A sneak preview of some of the works you'll see in Picasso on Paper.
Open the text to find out more about the work, and select the image to see a large version.
1904
Picasso had no formal training in printmaking and made his first prints with the help of his friend the artist Richard Canals. Made in 1904 when Picasso was twenty-two years old, The Frugal Meal was only his second etching yet remains one of his most celebrated.
This print was executed on an old zinc plate. Picasso and Canals were not thorough in scraping down this plate, which had previously been used for a landscape composition: vestiges of the grasses in the foreground of the landscape can still be seen in the top right area of Picasso’s print.
1906
This outstanding drawing demonstrates the giant leap Picasso made between 1905 and 1906, when he moved on from the emaciated and androgynous circus performers of his Pink Period and instead introduced figures which have greater mass and weight. This shift coincided with a trip to Gósol in Spain, where he spent the summer of 1906.
On his return to Paris from Gósol, he repainted the portrait of the American writer Gertrude Stein which he had already spent some months working upon. He now gave her a stylised, mask-like face, and introduced that style into other paintings and drawings.
1910
Throughout the summer of 1910, Picasso lived and worked at Cadaqués, on the Costa Brava. It was here that his work ‘cubist’ period began. He began to abandon obvious figurative references and open up the closed form of the body, allowing space and solid forms to interpenetrate and the graphic marks of lines and curves to take on their own logic.
In this drawing we can decipher the buttocks, the breasts and the curve of the leg – but otherwise the drawings of this period are about as abstract and austere as Picasso’s graphic work became.
1921
In 1914-15 Picasso performed a surprising change of tack. Known as the co-inventor and leading light of the cubist movement, he quietly made a number of drawings which are extremely realistic. His classical style was much indebted to Renoir’s late nudes, indeed Picasso bought a large Renoir painting, Seated Bather in a Landscape, in 1919.
Picasso’s work reached its apogee in terms of hefty classical figures in 1921. This pastel drawing is one of two very similar works, both of which belong to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. It was illustrated on the cover of the Ballets Russes’ programme for the ballet Cuadro Flamenco in May 1921.
1937
This print is based upon preparatory drawings for Guernica, Picasso’s masterpiece. The figure of the weeping woman did not appear in the finished mural, but it does serve as the basis for this stunning etching.
Printed in July 1937, it is one of only fifteen copies, and was bought by Roland Penrose, Picasso’s biographer, soon after its creation. Much later, in the 1970s, Penrose presented it to his friend Jennifer Drew, who would eventually leave it to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
1941
In 1936, at the Deux Magots Café in Paris, Pablo Picasso met Henriette Theodora Markovitch, better known as Dora Maar. The pair soon became lovers, and Dora began appearing in much of Picasso’s work: she was the inspiration behind Weeping Woman I and many of the studies for Guernica.
In May 1943 Picasso met Françoise Gilot, who supplanted Maar in Picasso’s affections. Maar then led a reclusive life in Ménerbes, a village in south-eastern France. She was a celebrated photographer and painter, holding numerous exhibitions.
1945
In November 1945, Picasso began working in the lithographic studio of Fernand Mourlot. Encouraged by Mourlot, Picasso adopted a painterly approach to lithography.
This piece is one of a remarkable series of eleven lithographs, begun on 5 December 1945 and finished on 17 January 1946. At first Picasso made a wash drawing on the lithographic stone. Over the next month he reworked the image again and again, using a pen, brush and scraper. Once Picasso had finished reworking each image, Mourlot printed eighteen copies of that state. The use of the pen and scraper was very unusual in lithography, but was typical of Picasso’s inventive approach.
1949
This print is taken from a series of lithographs begun by Picasso in 1948 in which Françoise Gilot is depicted seated and dressed in a Polish coat.
Picasso’s original intention was to produce a five-colour lithograph, employing a separate zinc plate for each colour. But he was unhappy with the results and subsequently reworked each of the plates, printing them in black. The subtitle of this print, ‘from the red’, refers to the fact that this image was a reworking of the red plate in the original colour lithograph.
1958
This portrait, made in July 1958, was Picasso’s first independent linocut. It was based on a postcard sent to him by his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler of a painting by Lucas Cranach the Younger. Cranach’s painting of 1564 is delicately modelled and coloured, making it an unexpected choice for turning into a linocut.
Adopting the conventional technique for colour linocuts, Picasso cut a different linoleum block for each different colour in the print. Registering each block correctly was complicated, hence the slight overlaps and gaps between the colours.
1962
One of Picasso’s greatest linocut prints, Still life with a Glass under Lamplight was made from a single linoleum block, cut four times and printed in yellow, red, green and black. The colours would have been printed in that order, with the lighter colours followed by the darker ones.
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