Corrida en Arles

Throughout his career, Picasso was often frustrated by methods of colour printing which required separate plates for each primary colour. This laborious approach of creating chromatic range through overprinting did not suite Picasso's spontaneous approach to image making. As a result, with the exception of relief printing in which the artist pioneered a new linocut technique known as the reductive method, colour prints are rare in his oeuvre. Of the few examples of colour printing in intaglio, Corrida en Arles is the most ambitious in scale. Drawing the key plate with a pocketknife through a soft varnish called vernis à la cire, Picasso then added two colour plates, one printed in red, and the second inked à la poupée, a method in which the plate is inked in more than one colour, selectively applied with a dabber to different areas of the composition. In this impression, the blue shadows to the bullring, the bright yellow sunlight and the pale green afternoon sky are all printed from the same plate. This approach to inking allowed for a much greater degree of experimentation - the coloration of all three known impressions printed in this manner before steel-facing and from all three plates is unique. Although a more intuitive approach to printing colour, this method does not seem to have satisfied the artist as the print was never editioned.