Picasso never stopped. He was relentless, prolific, voracious. He apparently produced 50,000 artworks in his lifetime, including thousands of paintings, countless drawings, tons of ceramics and – as this show at the British Museum proves – a vast amount of prints.
They were just another way he expressed himself, another medium for him to try. This chronological show takes you from his early etchings in Paris to his final linocuts in Vallauris. Along the way it touches on every aspect of his long, wild life.
The earliest etchings are dark, troubled, manic things. A family huddles in a barren field, a fragile couple shares some scraps of bread (an image you might have seen at the RA’s ‘Picasso and Paper’ show in 2020), a woman peers out of the shadows. All the pain, poverty and anguish (and plenty of the ideas and compositions) of his Blue Period are transmuted into grey and black, but in rougher, less assured form than his paintings.
When it clicks, it’s Picasso at his freest, funnest, loosest.
That’s because throughout his life, printmaking was a chance to experiment, to try out ideas without committing paint to canvas. So his moves through cubism and surrealism, his obsession with bulls and Minotaurs, his relentless simplifying of line and curve and form, all get tried out here, messed with, tested.
Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes his figures are messy and poorly defined, sometimes the compositions are ugly and conflicted. But when it clicks, like it does in the orgiastic ecstasy of ‘Bacchic scene with Minotaur’ or the big bold simplicity of his lithographs, it’s Picasso at his freest, funnest, loosest.
This show show doesn’t tell you anything about Picasso that you didn’t already know, and it doesn’t address any of the more problematic aspects of his abusive relationships with women, which he himself is more than happy to celebrate in the all awkward, horny images here. It is, however, a chance to watch him try stuff out, to see a master of modern art experimen† right in front of you. Prints aren’t where Picasso excelled, but Pablo’s mediocre is still better than pretty much everyone at their best.
