Picasso was one of the most creative and experimental talents ever to explore the medium of print. This book charts his career as a printmaker, which was characterised by close collaboration with skilled printers, through which extraordinary artworks were produced.
Printmaking was a vitally important activity in the long artistic career of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). His long-standing, if at times episodic, engagement with printmaking, stretched from his early years in Paris until his old age in 1972. This book explores how the technical challenges of working in different print media (etching, aquatint, linocut and lithography) inspired Picasso's creativity.
Together with a stunning selection of works on paper by Picasso, it also includes sculptures, drawings and prints by other artists and cultures of the kind that inspired Picasso. His prints often demonstrate his keen sense of belonging to an artistic lineage stretching back to antiquity (stemming from his kinship with the Mediterranean world of his birthplace, Málaga), as well as great artists of the past such as Raphael, Rembrandt and Ingres. One section explores the contradictions and controversies relating to Picasso's relationships with his wives and lovers. The focus on Picasso as a printmaker will argue for the importance of this activity in his long artistic career, and his continued relevance as one of the most creative and experimental talents ever to explore the medium of print.
American-born artist R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007) was one of the most controversial artists of the second-half of the twentieth century. His distinctive, highly personal and often challenging works drew on many influences ranging from literature to politics and film. The British Museum holds a near complete set of the artist's proofs, the best representation of the artist's graphic works in the UK. Kitaj worked in England for almost forty years - until 1994 when his ill-fated retrospective exhibition at the Tate was savaged by the critics. Hurt by the hostile reception of his works in his adopted homeland and grieving for the sudden death of his young wife, the painter Sandra Fisher, Kitaj left England for good, returning to America, declaring, 'London is dead to me now'. It was in London that he developed his early style and influenced many of his close circle of friends, including David Hockney, who he met at the RCA, and Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. This led him to coin the term 'School of London', later associated with this group of purely figurative artists. This exciting and beautifully produced book amounts to the definitive collection of the artist's graphic works, and is the first to examine in detail Kitaj's prints for almost twenty years.
