Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s rejection of realistic representation in painting in around 1908 led him to experiment with a radical new approach. Working closely with fellow artist Georges Braque, he developed a style which came to be known as ‘analytic Cubism’. As the name suggests, the artists approached the subject of the painting, whether portrait, still life or landscape, as a problem to be analysed. The subject was depicted in the work as a series of shapes and planes, as though viewed simultaneously in the round. Working in a restricted palette of dark tones, the artists created a new pictorial structure, one that collapsed the distinction between figure and ground.

What is Cubism?

Cubism is considered one of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century. Its key artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, were inspired by the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne. His use of geometric forms and planes of colour and the flattening of pictorial depth represented an early phase of cubism.

The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of great upheaval, marked by industrialisation and mechanisation, whereby goods were being made by machine rather than by hand. With the invention of new technologies came the need for a new method of representing the world. Cubism grappled with the inherited understanding of painting as an illusion, a system of light and shadow and form and colour, made to appear three- dimensional. For their part, cubists flattened the picture plane to represent multiple perspectives and viewpoints and to combine time and space within any one image.

The early history of cubism can be divided into two stages. The first, analytic cubism, involved the breakdown of the pictorial plane. During synthetic cubism, the second stage, materials like wallpaper, twine and newspapers were incorporated into the work itself. These works were influential for later developments in collage, sculptural assemblage and the readymade.

Picasso’s willingness – even playfulness – to change his visual vocabulary is evident in the selection of prints below. Two drypoints from his earliest series of prints were made soon after the artist moved to Paris and before his experiments with Cubism. Picasso’s imagery was influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s frank depictions of circus performers, dancers and harlequins. Picasso saw these figures as outsiders in society, a position with which he, as an artist, perhaps also identified. The forms in Tête de femme, de profil and Salome are rendered in line rather than tone using the drypoint technique, whereby the delicate outlines are scratched onto a zinc plate with a sharp instrument.

Picasso took up lithography at the end of the Second World War in the workshop of Fernand Mourlot, a master printer, after a break of fifteen years. His renewed interest in the medium coincided with a new love, Françoise Gilot, whom Picasso had met in 1943 and with whom he had two children, Paloma and Claude, before separating in 1953. Figure composée II, a wash drawing with gouache and crayon on lithographic paper, which was then transferred to stone for printing, was created in March 1949. The large portrait depicts Françoise Gilot’s face in profile, and from the front. It was made during a period of intensive involvement with lithography, Picasso completing as many as three portraits of her in one day.

Text by Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, from Monet to Matisse Catalogue 2026.