Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

This fine colour linocut is part of a relatively small production of works in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre. The artist’s first experience with the medium of linocut was in 1952, when he created a series of posters for the potters of Vallauris, a village close to Cannes. Although the result was stunning, Picasso found the process too complex. He had to use different blocks to print each colour, combining them to arrive at the finished image. From then on, he focused on the mediums of etching and lithography. However, when he moved from Paris to Villa La Californie at Cannes and then in 1958 to his new property Château de Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, Picasso was not able to work in these media as easily. Whereas proofing plates for etchings and lithographs took only a few hours when he resided in Paris, the process now took days – hence his return to linocut. This time, using the new reduction technique, he now printed every colour using the same block, cutting the board further to create each coloured layer. Despite simplifying the printing process, this left Picasso no room for error. The method required an incredible amount of vision to foresee how each change made to the block would affect the composition. Fortunately, this was the very kind of artistic challenge that motivated and excited Picasso.