Jacqueline lisant

One of the greatest graphic artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso executed an astoundingly diverse body of prints across his eight-decade-long career. Since producing his first print as a teenager in 1899, he experimented with a range of printmaking techniques, including engraving, etching, drypoint, lithography, monotype, and, as seen here, linocut. In Jacqueline lisant, Picasso returns to one of his most enduring motifs: a woman reading. The artist often depicted his lovers—from Marie-Thérèse Walter to Dora Maar to, in the present work, Jacqueline Roque—in this solitary, pensive act, which allowed him to capture the quiet introspection and subtle serenity of a woman’s face at rest. This larger-than-life example, created when Picasso was living in the south of France in 1964, showcases the renewed vigor and stylistic experimentation that characterized his late oeuvre.

Jacqueline was Picasso’s last love and their marriage lasted 12 years, until his death in 1973. Since first encountering her in the summer of 1952 at Madoura Pottery in Vallauris, where she worked as a salesperson, he executed over four hundred portraits of her—more than any of his other lovers. She is instantly recognizable in Jacqueline lisant by her high cheekbones, bold eyebrows, and distinctive feline face, which became recurrent emblems in Picasso’s late paintings and prints. This period of the artist’s life, which was dubbed by his biographer John Richardson as “l’époque Jacqueline,” shows the scope of the transformation of Picasso’s visual language through his images of his final muse.

Although Picasso had executed his first linocut in 1939, his interest in the medium was renewed in the 1950s, when he began experimenting with it in earnest with the master printer Hidalgo Anéra in Vallauris. The soft surface of linoleum allowed Picasso to carve fluid, continuous contours in relief, which mirrored the sinuous lines found in his paintings. Linocut had been taken up by previous modernist masters, such as Henri Matisse and Joan Miró, but Picasso’s development of a ‘reductive’ technique revolutionized the aesthetic and technical possibilities of relief printing. His unique process, which involved progressively carving away portions of the same linoleum block to print successive layers, created complex compositions that had previously been impossible. Unequivocally a master of graphic artmaking, Picasso pushed the boundaries of linoleum cutting to new heights; as the print expert Donald Karshan declared: “Picasso turned [linocuts] into an innovation of the first magnitude.”