Picasso in Print: Mattias Vendelmans plays favorites at the British Museum

Paying homage to Picasso’s surprising career as a printmaker, The British Museum proves that the Spanish master’s well has not run dry. Art dealer Mattias Vendelmans picks his favorites from the artist’s printed treasures, now on display. 

BY MATTIAS VENDELMANS | HAPPENINGS | 8 NOVEMBER 2024

Pike II, 1959, Pablo Picasso © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) did not reserve his characteristic daring for painting and sculpture alone. Equal passion was spent in his approach to printmaking, exemplified by a new exhibition at the British Museum. Within the worlds of intaglio prints, lithographs and linocuts, Picasso continuously sought to push the boundaries of the medium and experiment with new techniques. Catherine Daunt, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Prints at the museum did not overstate when noting that "few artists contributed more to the medium in the 20th century".

The result is an oeuvre spanning 2,400 prints, made over seven decades of Picasso’s life. The British Museum holds the country’s most extensive collection of these, consisting of around 500 prints and portfolios, and of this collection some 100 works are presently on view as part of Picasso Printmaker.

The thoughtfully curated selection of works not only tells the story of Picasso’s printmaking but - thanks to the persistence of the medium throughout his career - it is as if Picasso’s very lifeline snakes through the display. So, how to navigate an exhibition which is saying so much? By picking favourites, of course.

Salomé, Pablo Picasso, 1905, published 1913. Drypoint. Courtesy The British Museum. 

We start at the beginning, or rather, one of Picasso’s first professional prints. Executed in 1905, shortly after he settled in Montmartre, Salomé is a wondrous depiction of the tale of Salomé’s dance act before King Herod in response to the beheading of John the Baptist. What strikes us first, is that what is not engraved, for the sheet contains mostly empty space. Picasso chose to isolate the four figures - Salomé, her mother, the king, and a kneeling woman holding the plate upon which the decapitated head is presented - and they appear to float, independently but in alignment, through space.

That same year, Richard Strauss adapted Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé into an opera and, when listening to the music, it is easy to imagine the central figure effortlessly leaping through the air. Perhaps Picasso heard it too? Untethered by gravity, his Salomé recalls a trapeze artist, more than a biblical princess. And indeed, the engraving was included in Ambroise Vollard’s 1913 folio of Picasso prints titled La suite des saltimbanques (Suite of acrobats), alongside other works from his restrained but highly evocative Blue Period.

Woman gazing at a sleeping Minotaur from the Vollard Suite, Pablo Picasso, 18 May 1933. Etching. Courtesy The British Museum.

The 1930s signal the rise of one of Picasso’s most iconic motifs: the Minotaur. Stemming from Greek mythology, this creature was essentially a hybrid between a bull and a man, and its muscular and hairy body appears on a large number of Picasso’s prints. While connotations to Spanish bullfighting may be made, it is the Minotaur's apparent concession to its primal, sexual desires that seemed to most fascinate Picasso. In time, the creature would come to symbolize Picasso, the man, in what reads like a visual exploration of the self. The minotaur was recognised by The Surrealists, too, as a representation of ‘a person’s dark, animalistic instincts’.

It is with this in mind that I observe Woman gazing at a sleeping Minotaur (1933). Compared to other prints depicting the same creature, this work is almost shockingly intimate. Perhaps this is so because the roles are - momentarily - reversed. The creature is vast asleep on a sea of pillows, unaware of the woman sitting by his side as she attentively watches over him. Is it the calm before the storm? Or is it the moment of tenderness that followed it?

Thinking of Goya: women in prison from the 347 Suite, Pablo Picasso, 16 July 1968 I. Sugar aquatint on greased plate. Courtesy The British Museum.

Picasso was exceptionally prolific in 1968. Aged 86 and perhaps attempting to challenge his own mortality, he produced 347 etchings, drypoint and aquatints within a seven-month period. Together these form the aptly titled 347 Suite. Some are tributes to great artists who came before him (whom Picasso likely regarded as peers), such as Francisco Goya, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet.

The works I am most drawn to are those where the surface is covered almost entirely in black ink. The figures making up the composition are not so much drawn, as rather existing in the blankness of the paper. One of these is Thinking of Goya: women in prison in which a group of voluptuous women gather in a dark space before a barred window. While Picasso thinks of Goya, I recall Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, with its scenography consisting of a dim room and dark figures illuminated only by the light of the moon pouring in through the window.

While it turns out that Bergman’s film was indeed released earlier that year, I must admit it is somewhat of a stretch and the influence of avant-garde cinema on Picasso’s image-making is likely not to exist at all. Still, spontaneous comparisons such as these are illustrative of very richness of Picasso’s printmaking which, spanning from the Blue Period to his late work, is still able to astonish and captivate new audiences.

Picasso: Printmaker, 7 November 2024 - 30 March 2025; British Museum, London