See Picasso’s Lesser-Known Print Works, Which He Continued Experimenting With Into His 80s

Pablo Picasso is most famous for his role in the Cubist movement, creating abstract paintings that showed a subject from multiple perspectives. Now, a new exhibition at the British Museum is revealing a lesser-known part of his career: his skill as a printmaker.

The Spanish artist produced nearly 2,500 prints—about 100 of which will be on display at the show in London. Although Picasso had little formal training, his curiosity drove him to explore etchings, lithographs, aquatints and linocuts.

“Many people will be familiar with Picasso’s paintings,” says Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the British Museum, in a statement. “But this exhibition aims to build an appreciation of him as a master of printmaking and highlight how his lifelong experimentation with the medium inspired his creativity.”

Titled “Picasso: Printmaker,” the exhibition begins with a young Picasso’s first professional print in 1904. The piece, The Frugal Meal, depicts a gaunt couple at a dinner table before an empty bowl, a small loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. While the man puts his arm around the woman, the two avoid eye contact, staring blankly in opposite directions.

Picasso created the celebrated print during his blue period. “Much of his work at that time was … melancholy in tone,” Catherine Daunt, the British Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary prints, tells the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “There were lots of people living in relative poverty around him—alcoholics, sex workers, itinerant performers, other artists like himself.”

Also on view are prints from the “Vollard Suite,” one of Picasso’s most celebrated series. The artist took inspiration from classical mythology and other print artists for the series, which includes 100 etchings made between 1930 and 1937. One of those works, Faun Uncovering a Woman (1936), “illustrates the development of Picasso’s skills in the medium during this period as well as his interest in Greek and Roman art and mythology,” per the museum.

“Printmaking became, for Picasso, the art form through which he could tell stories and follow a thought or idea,” says Daunt in the statement. “Few artists contributed more to the medium in the 20th century.”

Picasso worked with prints well into his later years, and the exhibition will include pieces from the 347 Suite, which he made when he was in his 80s. The artist created the 347 images in a frenzied seven-month stretch in 1968, though only 28 will be on view.

“They are erotic and fantastical works filled with beasts, breasts and bands of blackness,” writes Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. “In [the series’] best-known work, Picasso, His Work and His Audience (1968), the octogenarian quite bluntly confronts himself and his viewer.”

The British Museum has been actively acquiring Picasso prints in recent years. With over 500 in its possession, it now has the largest collection in the United Kingdom.

These artworks exemplify Picasso’s “relentless creativity and curiosity and eagerness to find new ways of making images,” Daunt tells the Guardian. “He saw printmaking not just as a way of reproducing an image, but as something on paper that couldn’t be done on canvas.”

“Picasso: Printmaker” will be on view at the British Museum in London from November 7, 2024, to March 30, 2025.