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拍品專文
Jacqueline Picasso, née Roque, met the artist in the summer of 1952 and became his second wife eight years later. The couple left Paris in 1958, dividing their time between Villa La Californie at Cannes and the newly acquired property Château de Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence. While the move facilitated Roque in becoming Picasso’s most frequently depicted muse over the following twenty years, and ensured the harmonious bliss of the happy couple, it presented a major practical drawback in the hindered communications with Picasso’s printing studios in Paris. While living near the studio plates could be proofed and returned within a matter of hours; now it took days.
In a quest to retain the immediacy of the artistic process Picasso started exploring the technique of linocutting which would not require the intermediary of a distant Parisian workshop. Picasso found the outcomes, such as a stunning re-imagining of Lucas Cranach’s Portrait of a Young Girl, satisfying but became increasingly frustrated with the labour-intensive, convoluted process that required the cutting and registering of several different colour blocks to be printed precisely one on top of the other. As was typical of Picasso when faced with technical difficulties, he relished this challenge and in an audacious move completely re-invented the technique in the short period of 1958 to 1963. 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.
In being representative of both strands of these biographical themes, this work is an incredible culmination of both the personal apex Picasso was experiencing during this period of his life, being content in a stable relationship characterized with vitality and happiness, and also the pinnacle of his innovative professional methodology.
In a quest to retain the immediacy of the artistic process Picasso started exploring the technique of linocutting which would not require the intermediary of a distant Parisian workshop. Picasso found the outcomes, such as a stunning re-imagining of Lucas Cranach’s Portrait of a Young Girl, satisfying but became increasingly frustrated with the labour-intensive, convoluted process that required the cutting and registering of several different colour blocks to be printed precisely one on top of the other. As was typical of Picasso when faced with technical difficulties, he relished this challenge and in an audacious move completely re-invented the technique in the short period of 1958 to 1963. 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.
In being representative of both strands of these biographical themes, this work is an incredible culmination of both the personal apex Picasso was experiencing during this period of his life, being content in a stable relationship characterized with vitality and happiness, and also the pinnacle of his innovative professional methodology.