Footnotes

• In 1939 Picasso cut his first linoleum block; a simplified, yet violent form of a screaming woman in the anguish of war. At the suggestion of master printer Hidalgo Arnéra, Picasso returned to the medium in 1951 to produce boldly designed and simply conceived advertising posters for Vallauris ceramics crafts and bullfights. Between 1959 and 1968 his renewed interest in the art of linocut resulted in an exceptional group of innovative linocuts that demonstrate his unparalleled draftsmanship and artistic inventiveness in their arresting . Her visage became emblematic of the stylistic multiplicity that marks his late work.
  
  'Jacqueline Au Bandeau de Face' is a strikingly haunting linocut of Picasso's second wife and final companion. In simplifying the structural lines, Picasso accentuates Jacqueline's classical features: her high cheeckbones, long straight nose, enormous eyes and dark hair. In a dualistic presentation of Jacqueline's face Picasso creates a tension between the conflicting views of the face- The shadowed profile view looking inward to the self appears to be superimposed on a frontal view directed at the viewer. In this highly complex image, Picasso masterfully reduces form into a bold composition of flat, clearly delineated shapes. The uncarved flat surface of the linoleum was used to lay in one flat tone a colour background. This field received the subsequent images in beige, dark bcompositions and expressionist use of colour.
  
  Picasso's exploration of linoleum in his late work coincided with his final romantic affair. Picasso met Jacqueline Roque in 1953 when she was working in a sales position for the Madoura pottery studio on the South of France. They married in 1961, when Jacqueline was 35 and Picasso 79. The couple remained together until the artist's death in 1973, a relationship that lasted far longer than any other for Picasso.
  Jacqueline became a catalytic force behind Picasso's creativity and the subject of hundreds of works between 1954 and 1972. Fascinated with the creative process, the artist recorded the constant metamorphosis of her image in editions and successive states. Picasso absorbed her features into his artistic vocabulary creating tender likeness as well as portrayals that reflected the sitter's and his own changing moods. In addition to their emotional resonance, Jacqueline's portraits also offered opportunities for extensive experimentationrown and black progressively cut and printed from the same block. This impression of 'Jacqueline Au Bandeau de Face' exemplifies the richness of colour and surface texture achieved with the reductive method of printing.
  
  William Lieberman, introduction to Picasso Linoleum Cuts (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 9-14

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Category: Fine Art / Prints

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