Picasso’s Prints

Half​ acrobat, half can-can dancer, Picasso’s Salome kicks her leg up as Herod Antipas, corpulent and sagging, takes in the spectacle, flanked by his bride, dark-eyed Herodias. The king’s rheumy gaze is fixed on his stepdaughter’s nakedness. In the corner, a kneeling servant proffers Salome’s reward, chosen at her mother’s behest: the severed head of John the Baptist, gory and ragged, already halfway to bone. But Salome, still dancing though the deed is done, is the star of the show; no one spares the bloody head so much as a glance.

It’s an early print, a drypoint etching from 1905 – an artefact from the period when Picasso, in his early twenties, was living in the tumbledown squalor of the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. His paintings at that time were moving from blue to rose, the melancholy underworld of syphilitics and absinthe drinkers displaced by an arcadia of particoloured acrobats and harlequins – dreams of an itinerant life in the pink, where the toad-like Herod of Salome appears as a portly jester, dressed in red, his mitre demoted to a fool’s cap. (John Richardson observes that for once Picasso actually wrote down the model’s name – ‘El tío Pepe, Don José, à 40 ans’ – ‘probably because it is the same as his father’s’. Every father is both a clown and a king.) There had been a revival of interest in Salome at the Fin de Siècle. She was variously reimagined as a lethal temptress, tragic ingenue or sacred muse; Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a poem for her the same year his friend Picasso made his etching. The print went into the Saltimbanques series, though the biblical theme made it an outlier; Ambrose Vollard published it in 1913.

Several prints from this series open the British Museum’s show Picasso Printmaker (until 30 March). The museum didn’t collect much Picasso while he was alive, the catalogue explains, since it was thought ‘undesirable to spend public money purchasing work by living artists’. Once Picasso had died, it began to hoover up etchings and linocuts and lithographs and aquatints. The vaults now hold 553 of Picasso’s prints, the largest collection in the UK. Picasso Printmaker sets some of these riches before us.

The works are presented chronologically, starting with the Saltimbanques images of 1904-5 and ending with a handful of bawdy, flamboyant late works on the theme of Raphael and La Fornarina – a theme borrowed from Ingres, in which Picasso pictures the Renaissance master in flagrante with his young lover, a baker’s daughter called Margherita Luti, while various figures look on. (La Fornarina is typically identified as the lover with whom Raphael had ‘pursued his amorous pleasures beyond all moderation’ – something which Vasari says eventually led, after an occasion on which he happened to be ‘even more immoderate than usual’, to his death at the hands of overzealous doctors, who ‘imprudently bled him’ for a fever.)

In between these images from the beginning and end of his career, Picasso shapeshifts a thousand times: jagged cubist fragments are called to order in perfect classicism, then rear up in the tauromachic surrealism of the Vollard Suite in the 1930s; a touching menagerie for Buffon’s Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of substitutions. Picasso’s perpetual object is the human body, which is everywhere remodelled, schematised and simplified, rendered breathtakingly beautiful one moment and grotesquely ugly the next, and always treated with a joyous, merciless creativity. It would look cruel – and sometimes it does – if it weren’t also so witty, tragic and humane. Nothing is abstract in Picasso, all is concrete. He deals exclusively in solid objects: every form is closed, every line describes a volume, every body has weight. His drawing is a kind of sculpture.

‘Still Life under the Lamp’ (1962)

The linocuts are a particular revelation. Picasso came quite late to the technique, working on large surfaces with the printmaker Hidalgo Arnéra from the late 1950s. It is common for an artist to use more than one board to transfer different colours to the final print, but Picasso preferred the exacting ‘reduction’ method, in which each colour in the final image is printed at a different stage of cutting on the same board. The British Museum holds some real treasures in this medium, including a complete set of the colour proofs for the polychrome Still Life under the Lamp of 1962, one for each stage of the process. In glowing reds, greens and yellows, the lightbulb, wine glass and oranges progressively take shape and create the space around them, until the complete print explodes in a blaze of light. Picasso’s virtuosity and vision always astounds: you get the feeling he could do just about anything he liked, that his limitless command put him beyond success or failure. What would a bad Picasso look like? Whether it’s a line to make Raphael jealous or a provocative throwaway scrawl, everything works, even when it doesn’t. ‘Where do I get this power of creating and forming?’ he wondered in the mid-1960s. ‘I don’t know. I have only one thought: work.’

The image of the artist at work runs through Picasso’s oeuvre, and the artist is always himself. Even when it is someone else – Raphael, say, with his baker’s daughter – it is also him. The theme was for Picasso the equivalent of Rembrandt’s self-portraiture: a means of unflinching self-examination, which could speak to the entanglement of creative work with desire, virility, love and cruelty. In the late works, it becomes a way to think about age, doubt, absurdity and physical shame. All of life could be poured into the image of the artist before his model. John Berger devotes the final passages of Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) to a series of ink drawings from the early 1950s in which Picasso pictures himself in various guises, accompanied by a nude woman. Delighting in cruel self-mockery, he transforms compulsively, appearing as a masked grotesque, a cherub, a raddled old pervert, an absurdly dull painter, a melancholic clown, a young lover, and finally a monkey, borrowed from the Buffon prints, sitting at the easel, paintbrush in hand – ‘the bitterest of the series’, Berger says, viewing the whole set of images as an ‘old man’s confession [of] despair’.

The theme of artist, model and work also recurs in the Vollard Suite. In Sculptor and Kneeling Model, the model and reclining sculptor, both naked, face each other across a massive bearded and tousled head, lolling on its side. In Sculptor and His Model before a Window, the artist works on a headless torso; in Young Sculptor at Work, there is no model but an androgynous young artist, wearing flowers in their hair, works on a female head (lopped off and put on a pedestal, it has the familiar bulbous profile of Picasso’s then lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter). The missing heads, the naked girls, the older sculptor – there is an uneasy echo of Salome, as though Herod were an obscene old artist, Salome his model, and poor John’s head the work that is conjured between them.

Yet Salome, the dancer, is the real artist in that triad. (Picasso’s wives, lovers and muses were often artists in their own right: Olga Khokhlova was a ballet dancer, Maar a photographer, Gilot a painter and ceramicist.) And no one wants to be Herod. So at the end Picasso preferred to be Raphael, ‘a very amorous man who was fond of women, and always quick to serve them’, no longer wasting time painting his muse, but getting busy on the other side of the easel. In the Fornarina prints from the 347 Suite – named for the number of etchings in a series produced by the 86-year-old Picasso between March and October 1968 – the picture is finished or isn’t being done at all; artist and model are happily entwined on rumpled sheets, and someone else (the pope in one image, Picasso’s printmaker Piero Crommelynck in another) is given the job of looking on at the scene. The hour is late, and lovers always have something better to do than work. But under the bed lurks another figure, as monstrous as Raphael or Picasso: horribly hairy and beady-eyed, the face of Michelangelo peeps out from beneath the falling coverlet. The violence of it all can’t be swept aside completely – and it’s never very easy to get rid of a severed head.