Picasso Linoleum Cuts

This broad selection of linocuts by Picasso shows his use of this relief technique during a very specific point in his career, and how the innovations he introduced would revolutionise the world of linocutting.

The exhibition presents a complete selection of linocuts, most of them made between the years 1959 and 1962, complemented by a few previous examples dated 1939 and other later works from the early fifties onwards. The technique of linocut, scarcely used by printmakers, was first employed by Picasso for the posters advertising the ceramic exhibitions and bullfights regularly held in Vallauris. His interest in the chromatic possibilities that linoleum cutting offered him led him to explore it in greater depth than other graphic techniques. The first linocut not conceived as a poster was Portrait of a Woman, after Lucas Cranach, dated 1958. The following year, Picasso and printer Hidalgo Arnéra developed a reductive process that broadened the possibilities of this printing technique, the first step in a series of innovations that would transform the realm of linoleum printmaking.