Pablo Picasso’s linocuts began as posters, made in Vallauris with the printer Hidalgo Arnéra to announce local exhibitions and bullfights, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art records Vallauris Exhibition 1954 as a linoleum cut printed and published by Arnéra. The medium’s bold, simplified forms suited him, and the posters led to colour prints of increasing ambition, around 150 linocuts in all, with many of the most accomplished made in a burst between 1958 and 1963 and published by Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, among them portraits of Jacqueline Roque, whom he met at the Madoura pottery and married in 1961, and the bullfights, bacchanales and still lifes of the same years.
The difficulty lay in colour, since his 1958 portrait after Lucas Cranach the Younger would conventionally have needed six blocks, one for each colour, and registering that many was hard enough that, as the Minneapolis Institute of Art records, Picasso “sought a more reliable method using just one block for all the colors”, cutting a single block, printing the lightest colour, cutting away more of the surface and printing again until he reached the darkest, so that each stage removes the one before it and every print becomes the only record of how it was built.
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