New Pablo Picasso exhibition opens at British Museum
A new exhibition celebrating the work of Pablo Picasso is on display in London at the British Museum, offering an insight into the creative mind of one of the 20th century’s most vital artists.
The new exhibition, Picasso: Printmaker, will be a full career retrospective. The collection, which opens on November 7th, includes works from the very start of Picasso’s career in 1904 to the last years of his life and the final works he created in the 1960s.
By zoning in on Picasso’s prints rather than his more commonly displayed paintings or sculptures, the British Museum can explore the artist more closely. These pieces reflect his creativity but also the darker sides of his imagination and some of the more unsavoury aspects of his personality.
As an arguably easier form of creation, print work allowed Picasso time and space for exploration. Through these works, the artist would develop ideas that might turn into larger-scale pieces, or simply would just tell a story or deal with an emotion he was feeling at the time.
Some of the works feel diaristic as the museum claims that the exhibition also deals with the artist’s “complex relationships with women and his partnerships with printers, publishers and other artists”, with these artworks being telling about Picasso’s personal life.
For Catherine Daunt, a curator who selected some of the 100 artworks on show, this display of Picasso’s prints proves him to be one of the “most creative and influential” talents to explore the medium of print. “There’s a misconception that prints are copies of paintings,” she said. “But they are original works in their own right and Picasso completely understood that.”
Daunt also said that the exhibition celebrates the breadth of his skill and the variety of the printmaking form, “You can see, from the variety of techniques he used, [lithographs, linocuts, aquatints, drypoints and etchings] the vast possibilities there are with printmaking.”
From his early years as an impoverished artist trying to make his career work, through his fascination with post-war life in the 1930s and on-wards to his final years, still experimenting with different ideas, Picasso: Printmaker is a thorough examination of the artist’s incredible career. “He found great pleasure in printmaking and was experimental and creative until the very end of his life,” Daunt said, celebrating this career-spanning exhibition.
Picasso: Printmaker opens at The British Museum on November 7th, 2024.
