“They lived in a world of his own creation where he reigned almost as a king yet cherished only two treasures – freedom to work and the love of Jacqueline” 1
Picasso & Jacqueline. Image: David Douglas Duncan / Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
Jacqueline Roque fell into the arms of Picasso at a mere twenty-seven years old, after surviving a tumultuous childhood, abandoned by her father, and losing her mother at age eighteen. After taking a job at the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris in 1953, Jacqueline met Picasso when he was embroiled in making ceramics. By 1961 the couple were married (following the passing of Picasso’s first wife Olga Khokhlova), and their life in the South of France well established.
Coinciding with his new life and a new muse, Picasso engaged in a new printmaking technique – the linoleum cut. Fascinated by the immediacy of the linocut – the ability to carve a sheet of linoleum and have a print soon after – Picasso had discovered an alternative solution to the drawn out ‘back and forth’ of sending etching plates to Paris, finally finding a method to satisfy his need for instant gratification. Art historian Donald H. Karshan said, “the linocut was considered too limited, too unsophisticated a method to be used by mature artists… Until a fortuitous combination of circumstances, and the ravenous aesthetic appetite of Pablo Picasso, turned this innocent technique into an innovation of the first magnitude.”2
Picasso manipulated traditional making methods to invent a new ‘reduction’ linocut technique. Instead of carving a block for each colour of a design, Picasso used one block for the total image, carving or reducing each aspect of the image out of the block for each colour that was printed. He started with the lightest colours and finished with the darkest, giving each print more depth, texture, and fluidity. “He discovered that by printing in strong colours from the same block, after cutting away the unwanted parts, he could overprint more economically and obtain a density of colour and texture which gave entirely new possibilities to the process.”3
“To me a picture has always been a sum of total destructions”
—Pablo Picasso
Jacqueline au bandeau de face is an example of Picasso’s reduction method at its maturity. Throughout his linocut period, Jacqueline featured as Picasso’s subject most frequently, perhaps alluding to the artist’s infatuation with his new lover. Photojournalist and friend to the artist, David Douglas Duncan, wrote that Jacqueline never sat and posed for Picasso, but rather that he observed her, watching her movements and styles to emanate her effortless beauty and grace in his art. Through the linocut, Picasso explored his muse’s every aesthetic, developing her image to the point of caricature. While Jacqueline au bandeau de face is almost completely abstract, the sitter is immediately recognizable for her exaggerated dark eyes, arching eyebrows, and high cheekbones.
1 David Douglas Duncan, Picasso and Jacqueline, 1988, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, p. 9
2 Donald H. Karshan, Picasso Linocuts 1958-1963, 1968, Tudor Publishing Company, New York, p. VII
3 Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, in Pablo Picasso Experiments in Linogravure, 2014, Gagosian Gallery/Rizzoli, New York, p. 35
Provenance
Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998
One of the most dominant and influential artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was a master of endless reinvention. While significantly contributing to the movements of Surrealism, Neoclassicism and Expressionism, he is best known for pioneering the groundbreaking movement of Cubism alongside fellow artist Georges Braque in the 1910s. In his practice, he drew on African and Iberian visual culture as well as the developments in the fast-changing world around him.
Throughout his long and prolific career, the Spanish-born artist consistently pushed the boundaries of art to new extremes. Picasso's oeuvre is famously characterized by a radical diversity of styles, ranging from his early forays in Cubism to his Classical Period and his later more gestural expressionist work, and a diverse array of media including printmaking, drawing, ceramics and sculpture as well as theater sets and costumes designs.
Jacqueline au bandeau de face (Jacqueline with Headband) (Bl. 1069, Ba. 1303)
1962 Linocut in colours, on Arches paper, with full margins. I. 64 x 52.9 cm (25 1/4 x 20 7/8 in.) S. 75.4 x 62 cm (29 5/8 x 24 3/8 in.) Signed in blue pencil (underlined in red pencil), and bears the annotation 'E.A.' in pencil (one of 20 artist's proofs, the edition was 50), published by Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, 1963, framed.