Picasso. Printmaker at the British Museum

It’s been years since I last visited the British Museum. In fact, I don’t recall visiting since the opening of the Great Court designed by Foster and Partners in 2000. I greatly enjoyed seeing the huge collection of archaeological treasures from ancient Egypt and the Middle East. Even on a weekday morning it was crowded with tourists with babies in buggies and numerous school groups.

For some reason the British Museum holds the UK's largest and most representative collection of prints by Picasso, a selection of which was on show in one of the rooms on the upper floor during my visit. The museum didn’t collect Picasso while he was alive, because it was thought “undesirable to spend public money purchasing work by living artists”. After his death it began to purchase numerous etchings, lithographs and other prints.

It is always a pleasure to visit a Picasso exhibition: he is such a prolific artist. The exhibition is chronologically organized starting with images from 1904 and ending with a series of variations on the theme of Raphael and La Fornarina from the late 1960s. Picasso experimented with a variety of printmaking techniques, from etchings and lithographs to linocuts and aquatints. Stylistically, Picasso veered from classicism to cubism and surrealism and back. I always find it interesting to see that even at his most cubist, Picasso’s images are never fully abstract, they always contain some recognizable details. And if you look closely you can even begin to recognize the composition. Picasso’s illustrations for an edition of Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece are a perfect showcase for his artistic genius (middle above). The novel tells the story of a painter, who spends 10 years working on a potential masterpiece only to destroy it in a confused mass of lines upon finding the perfect model. Picasso would return to the theme throughout his life.

I actually find the prints that Picasso made towards the end of his life more interesting than the paintings from the same period. Whereas the latter show an artist well past his prime, the former show an artist playfully revisiting old themes. 

Picasso. Printmaker is at the British Museum through 30 March 2025