Pablo Picasso in Print

PABLO PICASSO IN PRINT

11th October - 23rd November 2019
Preview: Thursday 10th October, 6-8pm

Pablo Picasso was one of the most famous and prolific artists of the 20th century, and the founding father of the Cubist movement that set out how we see abstraction in art to this day. His works now stand as the star attractions at major museums and galleries across the world, but as well as his well-renowned paintings, Picasso also worked in print throughout his long creative career, producing a wide range of etchings, drypoints, woodcuts, lithographs and linocuts. This exhibition presents a selection of those prints from 1942 through to 1971, showcasing the Spaniard’s fantastic and distinctive style.

Covering thirty years of work in various print media, the themes within the prints on show are varied; from interpretations of Spanish literary classics, to natural histories, illustrations for operas and poems, and portraits of those close to the artist. Many of these pieces display the abstracted figures for which Picasso is perhaps most well known, but others are more illustrative, with a selection of realist portraits and caricature-type drawings,  as well as bulls, horses, birds and insects – the animals that played a major role in his interpretations of Spanish culture and history in paintings such as the legendary ‘Guernica’.

In 1919 Picasso began making lithographs, and during the next half century is known to have produced about 855 prints.  In collaboration with a few highly skilled printers such as the great Mourlot studio in Paris, he developed various techniques to demonstrate rich tonal qualities through his lithographs. He invented new methods within other ways of printmaking too, including the reduction method of linocut printing, removing increasing amounts of material from the original block for each new colour in the image, and would often use several different etching techniques within a single plate.­

Having shown work by Picasso alongside fellow Spanish masters Miró and Dalí at Gallagher & Turner in 2016, the exhibition’s curator, Oliver Doe, says that “bringing the work of one of the world’s most important Modern artists to Newcastle, and for the second time at Gallagher & Turner, is incredibly exciting. The breadth of work in the show is fascinating, and we can’t wait for people to be able to explore three decades of vitally important printmaking.”

The overall diversity and range of Picasso’s prints was dazzling, and he was undoubtedly one of the greatest printmakers of the 20th century.

All of the works in this show are unsigned original prints, produced between 1942 and 1971. Each print comes with a copy of the original justification page with further information about its provenance, edition size and the suite from which it was taken.

Images © DACS

All works are available for sale