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. 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. When Picasso returned to linocut a few years later, he had come up with an extraordinary solution to his technical problem: rather than use separate blocks for each colour, he printed the whole image from just one block in the so-called ‘reduction’ method. The block was printed in the lightest colour, then cut further and printed successively from the lighter to the darker colours. While making the task of registration much simpler, it required a tremendous power of imagination to foresee how each change in the block would affect the composition as a whole. It was precisely the kind of artistic experiment which Picasso enjoyed and he embraced the challenge wholeheartedly and playfully.

This vibrant portrait of the artist’s wife Jacqueline Roque is dedicated to the famous Swiss publisher and book dealer Albert Skira.