Dimensions:

Arches; deckled edges on the right and at the bottom; untrimmed

Arches

We color-starved Picasso print lovers really get a rise whenever we see a bit of color in his work.  All too often, however, Picasso limited his palette to the use of browns, especially in most of his linoleum cuts.  Was he just teasing us?   I suspect that brown is far from your favorite color—it’s certainly farthest from mine. Sure, there’s my friend Jonathan down the street, whose favorite color is brown.  I also remember the time when Harris, my freshman year roommate dyed all his clothes brown (I was aghast!).  In general, however, I suspect that Picasso’s browns were not a popular choice.

Now, I know we’re supposed to be appreciating the graphic beauty of his design rather than looking for something that goes with our red couch.  (I must confess that I toyed with naming our gallery Red Couch Fine Art, but was afraid that not everyone would get the joke, or that the rest would feel that I wasn’t being adequately high-brow.)  Still, I suspect that for most people, brown is not a very pleasing or inspiring color.  And, quite frankly, thoughts about decorating and how a room full of black-and-white prints or (worse) black-and-brown prints might look should not be repressed, at least in my opinion.  In general, I have a number of thoughts on how to prevent your walls from looking muted and still hang the Picassos you love and want to live with.  (I'll mercifully spare you, for the while.)

In any event, unlike most of the larger format linocut portraits of women which tend to be quite brown, the several linocuts such as this in which Picasso generously employed a lovely, bright orange, are a welcome relief. For once, both the design and the colors are delightful.

Picasso's artist's proofs tend to be in better condition than the numbered prints, since they were sequestered by the artist and later by his dealer for a much longer period of time.  Nowhere is that more consistently the case than among his linoleum cuts.  This flawless epreuve d'artiste bears out this distinction.

Interestingly, regarding this linocut and two others in our inventory at the time of this writing, Bloch numbers 1070 and 1082, Picasso began two of them on the same day in 1962, having created the third but two days earlier.  On the surface, they seem somewhat similar: in size, subject, and, in the cases of two of them, in coloration.  Yet no other artist, it seems to me, ever produced such stylistic variety at the same time.  One of them has the signature large-eyes, prominent nose with both nostrils on the same side, etc.  The next is a riff on the post-cubist “geometrism” which Picasso created so many thousands of iterations, each often nonetheless unique and quite different from the rest.  The last is more similar to the more realistic style of the lithographs of Jacqueline, yet very Picassoesque and gripping in the intensity of its subject’s introspective gaze.