Around a hundred engravings by Pablo Picasso are on display from Thursday at the British Museum in London, forming a sort of diary of the artist from his arrival in Paris until the last years of his life.
“Picasso made around 2,400 prints in his entire career. People are more familiar with his paintings, and so we really wanted to show that the engraved work was an important part of his work,” the exhibition curator told AFP. , Catherine Daunt.
This exhibition, “Picasso engraver”, opens with an etching entitled “The frugal meal”, dating from 1904.
Five years earlier, Picasso made his first etching, “El Zurdo” (“The Left-Handed”), when he was just 17 years old.
The Spanish artist then explored almost all the techniques of engraving, etching, drypoint, lithography, aquatint, linocut, underlines Catherine Daunt.
In his first works, “he was interested in the people around him in Paris, and represented scenes of poverty, acrobats, artists and street artists”, notes the curator.
The exhibition, which runs until March 30, 2025, features 97 of the 553 Picasso prints owned by the British Museum, made between 1904 and 1971.
Among them, the etching “Dream and Lie of Franco”, which is part of “La Suite Vollard”, a series of 100 prints engraved between 1930 and 1937 for the art dealer Ambroise Vollard.
Picasso recurrently addresses the theme of the painter and his model, as well as the myth of the Minotaur.
“These engravings tell us a lot about his life. We see the people who mattered to him, his wives and his mistresses, a reflection of his emotions, his experiences, the artists who inspired him. He was a very inventive engraver and creative”, believes Catherine Daunt.
In Suite 347, a series of prints produced between March 16 and October 8, 1968 by Picasso, then aged 86, he evokes the writer Honoré de Balzac, the painters Rembrandt and El Greco. Or even General de Gaulle, in a caricature produced at the time of the May 1968 revolt in France.
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