John Szoke is the founder of the John Szoke Gallery in New York, which has specialized in works on paper by Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch since 1980.
Pablo Picasso, Visage de Marie-Thérèse, 1928 (Probably October, Paris), Lithograph, 8 x 5 1/2 in, Courtesy John Szoke Gallery
Pablo Picasso made nearly 2,500 print editions over his 70-year career, a dense thicket that can’t be easily navigated. That said, looking at Picasso’s many approaches to his works on paper is also continually gratifying. I hope my gallery’s exhibition at Independent 20th Century will be a helpful introduction, enlisting four women, four epochs, and four prints of utter beauty, power, and technical prowess. These are hors d’oeuvres for a lifelong Picasso feast.
I’ll start with something that might be recognizable. Visage de Marie-Thérèse is a lithograph from 1928. Picasso mostly did lithographs and etchings early in his career, gravitating toward their linear freedom. A year before he made it, Picasso met his subject, Marie-Thérèse Walter, on a street in Paris. He was married and she was almost 30 years younger. The relationship moved fast, from artist and model to lovers, on and off, for decades.
The portrait is a close-up so it’s intimate. Picasso was drawing on his lithographic stone with Greek sculpture in mind. Marie-Thérèse’s distinctive features and voluptuous form would appear in countless works over the next decade. Crafted of gauzy lines, she seems otherworldly here, coming to us from shadows, her face cropped as if we were looking through a keyhole.
La Femme à la Résille, another lithograph, is from 1947 and depicts Françoise Gilot, the artist’s new lover. Picasso’s use of color (the work is also titled Femme aux Cheveux verts) makes the subject alive and present. He is playful, even tender, showing Françoise in a blouse with stylized hieroglyphics, looking straight at us with big, inquiring, sweet eyes. The image is as direct as a billboard.
Direct, but in a different way, is Weeping Woman I from 1937. An etching with drypoint and aquatint, it is based on Guernica, Picasso’s masterpiece depicting the devastation of a small town in the Basque Country by Nazi and Fascist Italian bombers in alliance with General Franco. It’s a view of agony and grief with jagged and slashing lines, black and white to reinforce the extreme emotion. The woman looks up, crying to God. Old Master takes on Mary’s anguish at the Crucifixion come to mind. No one invests line with emotion quite like Picasso, and nothing filled him with more emotion than Spain’s brutal civil war.
Pablo Picasso, La Femme à la Résille (Femme aux Cheveux verts), 1949, lithograph, 36 x 29 1⁄2 in, Courtesy John Szoke Gallery
Pablo Picasso, La Femme qui pleure I, 1937, Aquatint, scraper, drypoint and etching, 27 x 19 1/4 in, Courtesy John Szoke Gallery
Pablo Picasso, Buste de Femme au Chapeau, 1962, Linocut, 25 x 21 in, Courtesy John Szoke Gallery
Picasso’s linocuts come from one of his many bursts of creativity, this one late in life. Most of them are from a narrow window in the late 1950s and early 60s. Buste de femme au chapeau from 1962 is a triumph showing Picasso at his jazziest. His use of color in his printmaking was never richer.
A linocut is like a woodcut. The shapes and lines cut from the surface, in this case a sheet of soft linoleum, are the negative rather than the positive image of the print. Here Picasso was trying a new twist on the technique. Rather than using a different piece of linoleum for each color, struggling along the way with aligning forms and lines, he worked with a single sheet, printing the largest form in color first, and then recutting it and printing again and again with each successive color. This took vision and a taste for risk.
Simple, blocky forms; stark lines, straight and curving; and the abolition of tone make up a visually striking image that still feels contemporary, while reaching for the look of medieval sculpture. At the age of 80, Picasso proved his imagination was both fertile and encyclopedic. He was never static. He worked in one style or focused on one motif or explored one technique until he felt he had exhausted it. Then, off to the next adventure.
John Szoke is the founder of the John Szoke Gallery in New York, which has specialized in works on paper by Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch since 1980.