Pablo Picasso
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Pablo Picasso

Tête de Femme (B. 947; Ba. 1213)

Details
Pablo Picasso
Tête de Femme (B. 947; Ba. 1213)
linocut in colours, 1960, on Arches wove paper, signed in pencil, numbered 49/50, with wide margins, a faint uneven stain around the margins, pale discolouration in the margins at the sheet edges, a very soft crease at the lower left corner, otherwise in good condition, framed
L. 655 x 540 mm., S. 752 x 621 mm.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer's premium.

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Charlie Scott
Charlie Scott

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Lot Essay

In 1958 Picasso began to experiment with linocuts, a relief printing method championed in the 1920's by the London based Grosvenor School. For the next five years Picasso would work intensively in the medium. As with his other forays into printmaking, Picasso proved to be a natural, both inventive in his use of established methods, and iconoclastic, developing new ones as he went along. Frustrated by the complications of colour printing and of cutting a separate linoleum block for each colour, he invented the so called 'reduction' method: the uncarved block is printed in one flat colour, and then cut and printed in each successive colour, from lighter to darker tones. This technical simplification re-invigorated the medium, permitting a new level of creative freedom. Tête de Femme, with the fluidly carved aquiline features of a woman in profile, printed in three tones, is an elegant example. It's restrained palette of black, terracotta and yellow ochre evoke the earthy hues of the ceramics which Picasso was making at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris at the time, as well as his ancient Mediterranean sources of inspiration, early Minoan pottery and the red-figures vases of classical Greece.

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