Literature

 One of the largest and most impressive of many studies of Jacqueline’s face, Portrait de Jacqueline aux cheveux lisses was made at the height of Picasso’s activity in linocut, and represents a culmination of the artist’s innovations in the medium. As Leo Steinberg comments: ‘the face … remains from beginning to end Picasso’s chief battleground’ (Steinberg, ‘The Algerian Woman and Picasso at Large’, Other Criteria, p.162); perhaps nowhere is Picasso’s victory more visible than here. Combining the diagrammatic, the primitivist, the Cubist and, with the organic areas of flat primary colors perhaps inspired by the colorful paper cutouts made by Picasso’s old friend Henri Matisse during the previous decade, the purely abstract – it presents an examplary demonstration of the principle of simultaneity that Picasso was to perfect during the last twenty years of his life.

 

Linocut was the perfect medium for a virtuoso exercise in pure style such as this. Picasso made his first foray into linocut in the Vallauris workshop of Hidalgo Arnéra (1922-2007) in 1951, when he was invited to design a poster to advertise the town’s annual art exhibition. Over the course of the next decade he explored linocut’s graphic potential for producing dramatic and eye-catching images in a series of posters advertising local art exhibitions and bullfights, before embarking on an intensive period of experimental innovation during the first quarter of 1962, when he pushed his subject and medium to their limits. And he now had a new muse to inspire him too. In 1952, he met Jacqueline Roque (née Hutin) at the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris, where she was employed as a salesgirl after recently moving to the area, and he was transforming traditional earthenware into objects of high art. Picasso began courting Jacqueline in 1953 and by the following year they were living together, first in the artist’s rue des Grands-Augustins studio in Paris, and then from 1955 in a villa called La Californie on the outskirts of Cannes. Jacqueline’s famously exotic profile appeared in Picasso’s drawings of the artist and his muse before he recognized her in the crouching odalisque of Delacroix’s Woman of Algiers (1834), which he reworked obsessively in many variations during 1954-5. And from then on, as Marie-Laure Bernadac notes: ‘she is there always, everywhere. All the women of these years are Jacqueline.’ (‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’, in Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, Tate Gallery, London 1988, p.52.) Jacqueline married the artist in summer 1961, and they remained mutually devoted for the rest of their lives.

 

The planes of monotone colour that linocut produces render it the perfect medium for Picasso’s diagrammatic style of describing features, using his own personal blend of Cubist and Expressionist distortion mixed with the classical naturalism he had perfected over the years, which he now explored in all their possible variations of combinations. And as Jonathan Fineburg notes, in Picasso’s later portraits, ‘each fragment of a representational form … and discrete stylistic devices (shading, contrasts of light and dark, perspective, and line per se as embodied “things”) are treated as equivalent building blocks ... He levels the represented object and the means of representation and he makes a selection, as if from a list of homogenous items, to assemble a “likeness”’ of the person he is depicting. (Jonathan Fineburg, ‘The Sensual Garden of Picasso’s Late Work’, in Picasso and Jacqueline: the Evolution of Style, exhibition catalogue, Pace, New York 2014, pp.9 and17.) Indeed, Picasso’s subject rarely sat for him, but was depicted from memory, as he resolved his formal issues – questions of how to combine different views of a face in one plane for example, how to evoke both the side and the back of the head convincingly. Deconstructed versions of Jacqueline’s face and profile appear in Picasso’s paintings of the period, but it was in linocut that Picasso focused most reductively on this theme. Although made up of disjunctive elements – Jacqueline’s smooth hair and facial features viewed from alternate angles as linear emblems – Portrait de Jacqueline aux cheveux lisses displays them miraculously unified.

 

By the late 1950s, Picasso had become intensely frustrated by the fiddly and time-consuming process traditionally involved in cutting a new lino block for each color, which hindered his usual speedy method of additive production, and in September 1959, with Arnéra’s assistance, he invented he reduction technique. This simplified procedure enabled him to carve the successive stages of his image into a single block in a carefully planned order, permitting him to print progressively in different colors. Our unique set of working proofs demonstrates the order in which the five colours of Portrait de Jacqueline aux cheveux lisses were printed, as Picasso carved each state successively into a single lino block on February 16 1962. Carefully numbered and dated by Arnéra to retain a perfect record of the process, the set was completed with each of the individual states printed on white (numbers 2, 5, 8 and 10). After the unified background of light caramel had been printed (1), Picasso defined the parameters of his entire composition by carving all the areas of other colours from the block in one go. These parameters are visible in the first state, which was created by printing in yellow . Picasso then cut away the circular area below his subject’s chin for printing red over yellow in the second state . He did the same for the elongated P-shaped area to the side of Jacqueline’s face for printing the blue layer in the third state . Finally, for the fourth state, he removed the gourd-shaped area below the eyes and on the other side of the face, to print the defining linear elements of his composition in black