The Fascination With Printmaking - Pablo Picasso's “Buste de Femme au Chapeau”

Behind the vibrant colors and striking details of Pablo Picasso’s portrait “Buste de Femme au Chapeau”—likely inspired by his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom he often depicted wearing fancy hats—lies a meticulously planned, masterfully executed printmaking process. For his five-color print—comprising yellow, red, blue, green, and black—he uses just a single printing plate and the so-called “elimination printing” technique, which involves gradually cutting away more and more areas of the linoleum to create the five distinct printing forms, each of which is then precisely superimposed in different colors, ranging from light to dark. Thus, in “Buste de Femme au Chapeau” from 1962, Picasso begins by printing the largest area in yellow, then removes part of the linoleum and prints directly over it in red, removes another part of the linoleum and prints directly over it in blue, and so on, until he finally creates a masterpiece that does not reveal the precise method behind it.


It was not until the mid-1950s that Pablo Picasso began to explore the artistic medium of linocut. With his usual enthusiasm for experimentation, he immersed himself in this technique—which, until then, had been little used in the art world—and, together with the printer Hidalgo Arnéra in Vallauris, developed the elimination printing process described above. Unlike etching or lithography, linocut let him use bold, vibrant colors and produce complex multicolored prints with minimal material. And so Picasso—who continually reinvented himself throughout his artistic career—succeeded in establishing color linocut as a distinct and highly successful medium within just a few years. Although the technique accounts for only a small portion of his overall body of graphic work, his linocuts are among the artist’s most sought-after prints. They are still regarded today as masterpieces of modern printmaking—a category to which his colorful “Buste de Femme au Chapeau” from 1962 undoubtedly belongs. [AR]