PICASSO, Pablo.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Linolschnitte. (Linoleum Cuts.) First German edition, enhanced with two original drawings by Picasso to the front cover and title page. The copy is inscribed "pour Anne Lise" and signed and dated "15.10.63". Annelise Dierdorf was an art collector and patron, along with her husband Gottfried. Their collection included original paintings, prints, and rare books, many dedicated to the couple by their creators. Already a leading proponent of printmaking, under the guidance of printer Hildalgo Arnéra in Vallauris, Picasso mastered linocutting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, elevating a technique formerly associated with commercial printing and advertising to a sophisticated and collectable artform. He is often credited with pioneering the reductive, one-block printing process, printing and recutting a single block to produce complex images rather than using separate blocks. Most of these early linocuts were printed exclusively for Gallerie Louise Leiris in editions of 50. Reductive linocuts have a finite edition, determined by the print run from the initial state of the block, as each state is destroyed by the next. The linocuts reproduced in this book could not, therefore, be printed from the original blocks, however have been reproduced with a printing process that closely mimics the originals, with thick, distinct layers of paint.

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