Bacchanale avec chevreau et spectateur

Although linocuts form a relatively small part of Picasso’s oeuvre as a printmaker, he produced some of his most outstanding compositions by this method in a short burst of activity between 1958 to 1963. Unlike with techniques such as etching and lithography, no other artist had experimented much with the linocut before Picasso's exhaustive exploration of its creative possibilities. His first involvement with linocut printing had been rather casual. In 1952 he had produced a series of simple posters for the potters of Vallauris, a village in the hills above Cannes. It was only six years later that he engaged with the technique more intensely. Working with the young printer Hidalgo Arnéra, he re-imagined Lucas Cranach’s sober Portrait of a Young Girl. The resulting print is astonishing, but he found the process too labour-intensive and complicated, as it had required the cutting and registering of six different colour blocks, to be printed precisely on top of one another. As was typical of Picasso when faced with technical difficulties, he relished the challenge and in a bold move completely re-invented the technique. Rather than using separate blocks for each colour, he printed from just one; the so-called 'reduction' method where the uncarved block was printed in one flat colour, and then cut and printed in each successive colour. Whilst making the task of registration much simpler, this new technique required tremendous foresight to know how each change in the block would affect the composition.