Picasso devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to his pursuit of printmaking, from his earliest etchings created in 1904 at the age of 23, to his final suite of prints created within a year of his death in 1973. It is important to understand how central the creative challenge of printmaking was to Picasso—it was a multi-faceted approach to creating images that drove him to be prolific and innovative throughout the course of his long life. Towards the end, as he worked on a series of etchings that were to be his last, he said of the line drawings on the metal plates: “it is my way of writing fiction”. Picasso could be given many different illustrious titles to describe his epoch-making impact on the art of the twentieth century, and “Master Printmaker” is certainly not the least of those—printmaking drove him and inspired him in an unprecedented way.
Picasso’s earliest printmaking began in 1904 with a series he created based on drawings of the circus performers of Paris, the “Saltimbanques Suite”. He was a poor, struggling artist, newly arrived in Paris, and these etchings were an attempt to make money: that failed, and many were given away as gifts to fellow artists. This financial setback did not dampen the young Picasso’s enthusiasm for printmaking—in 1907 he bought his own printing press. Recently one of those early etchings, depicting an impoverished circus couple seated at a frugal meal, sold at auction for 7 figures. This illustrates two important points: printmaking was not an incidental practice for Picasso, but rather a vital and unique medium for expressing his ideas that involved his artistic fervor to the fullest extent, and secondly, although his output of prints was prodigious and lifelong, these works on paper are both original and valuable—in every sense of both terms.
The early creation of etchings can be explained in a few ways that may not be obvious to the layman. Imagine Picasso as someone trying to make a name for himself in Paris in 1904. His resources are limited and he lives and works in the seediest area of the city. A single painting is laborious and costly to make, and it is a single expression of an idea—one “message” this passionate communicator can send out into the world to represent who he is and what he is thinking. By contrast, a series of etchings, drawn into metal plates that can be printed in small editions, greatly expands the young artist’s “reach”. In the great tradition of a gigantic artistic figure like Rembrandt, printmaking brings art to a broader audience…and Picasso was hungry for an audience. Numbers tell an interesting story: Rembrandt, the greatest printmaker prior to Picasso, produced around 300 etchings in his entire life. Picasso created 347 etchings (drawings incised onto metal plates) in only 7 months—at the age of 79. Picasso created over 2,000 original works of art in the various mediums of printmaking throughout his career.
All printmaking—whether it be etching on metal plates, carving into smooth, soft linoleum, drawing onto a lithographic stone with a crayon, or making an image with a series of overlaid stencils, and the myriad variations within each method—is a way of making an image that presents the artist with technical and physical constraints. They are indirect ways of creating an image, and present inherent challenges for that reason. One can imagine that an artist of Picasso’s enormous capacity for invention liked the rigors of the printmaking process, and the element of unpredictability they offer. Printmaking is difficult, and it is exciting.
Picasso was always interested in the paradox of “skill”. Too much trained, cautious, rule-following practice results in dull, lifeless, and pedantic art; however, a complete abandonment of skill can result in art that fails to move, to communicate, to reach any satisfying sense of aesthetic achievement. Picasso studied the art of cultures that were considered “primitive”—or outside the western European tradition—as a way of embracing less literal means of artistic expression. Perhaps printmaking helped him to focus on the idea he was interested in communicating, because it had its own technical boundaries, and it certainly made those ideas accessible to more people. Printmaking is a skill of hand and eye that still carries with it the craftsman tradition, and again paradoxically, gives the artist defined parameters and at the same time, more freedom, by giving the content of the image primacy.
In 1911 Ambroise Vollard, a dealer, collector, and publisher who was instrumental in developing the careers of Cezanne, Renoir, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, bought the plates from Picasso’s first etching series. Vollard also commissioned Picasso to do three more suites of prints: one to accompany a story by Balzac, another illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a third known as the Vollard suite. The Vollard suite encompassed five main themes: the Battle of Love, the Sculptor’s Studio (Picasso was devoting a lot of attention to sculpture during the 1930s), Rembrandt, the Minotaur, and Portraits of Vollard. Picasso created this suite in 1939, but Vollard died in a car accident that year, and then the outbreak of World War II stalled the production and marketing of the artwork until the 1950s. Picasso then signed some of the prints to raise money for left-wing causes.
Up until this point Picasso’s printmaking involved processes like etching that resulted in black and white images. Around 1945 he began to work with lithographic methods that enabled him to produce images with color. In 1958 he began experimenting with linocut printing, which involves carving an image into the soft, pliable surface of linoleum and then inking that to create an image. This was also a colorful process in Picasso’s hands.
In the 1950s Picasso chose the Pochoir method for creating images based on some of his earlier paintings—the Pochoir images were then created for limited edition books. Pochoir allows for very colorful, intense pigments to be applied in through a series of hand-cut metal stencils—sometimes 40-100 different applications to create a finished image. It is a time-consuming and demanding process, and has largely gone out of use—making these original pieces by Picasso even more rare.
Picasso’s passion for the rigorous medium of printmaking continued into his (very active) old age. The series known as “347” is named for the number of etchings he created, mostly of a controversial erotic nature. This tremendous body of work was produced in 7 months, at the age of 79. The final series of prints called “156” (again for the number of pieces) was completed within one year of Picasso’s death in 1973.
Printmaking has a rich history, and has done important things for the great artist’s drawn to master this medium. From Albrecht Durer, to Rembrandt, and most famously of all, to Picasso, it has directed talent and creativity into new channels, and brought the ideas of the masters to a far greater number of art lovers than the rarified medium of oil painting. Perhaps it could be argued that the fame of these artists rests largely on the wide-ranging audience that printmaking makes possible, in their own time, and for posterity.
Notes on particular pieces:
Bagante Che Gioca Al Pallone, 1932 (Bather with a Beach Ball) was created after the painting by Picasso in 1932, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Fruttiera e Chitarra su Fondo Grigio, 1932 (Fruit Bowl and Guitar on Grey Background).
