As a way of better understanding the career of an artist whose production was so large and multi-faceted, this publication presents only one but very significant aspect of Picasso: the creator of "artists books", which in the first half of the twentieth century made some important editors very wealthy people.
90 original plates and lithographs highlight Picasso as a graphic artist, who executed illustrations for works such as Metamorphosis by Ovid and The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac. The extraordinary talent of the Spanish artist, who experimented with the most diverse techniques, gave life to works that in their emotional power are quite independent of the texts. In this way Picasso produced an extraordinary body of graphic art that is autonomous, and almost stronger, than his paintings. In contact with the poetic and literary environment, Picasso illustrated many books by writers who were friends of his, such as Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, and Jean Cocteau, in addition to masterpieces of classic literature. Without doubt many of his creations originated in concert with the authors, and with sharing ideas and experimentation, in which literature and painting inseparably merge. The plates represent a compendium of the themes that most interested the artist, from mythology to eroticism, artistic creation and bullfighting, and express an intense emotional power, born from his intellectual concerns and generated by a fantastic imagination. The collection highlights Picasso's supreme abilities as an experimenter: aquatint, dry point, burin, xylography, and he often printed the works himself. In his lifetime this artist produced more than 2,500 engravings (the first was produced in Barcelona in 1899) with a passion and technical ability that makes his work as a painter seem almost peripheral, and that established him as the major engraver of the twentieth century, the first, most original and innovative in terms of content and technique.
Picasso's work as a painter is closely connected - in a parallel way - to his work as a graphic artist: the graphic arts' greater expressive versatility enabled formal and technical solutions to be arrived at first, which the artist then put into effect in his paintings.
Bari, Castello Svevo 7 October - 15 November 2006
Milan, Fondazione Stelline
15 February - 18 March 2007
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