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These past several weeks we’ve been talking about Picasso’s early days of printmaking. But let's switch gears now. Last month, after over a decade of delays and setbacks, a museum dedicated to Edvard Munch opened in Oslo. Called “MUNCH,” the 13-story building is one of the largest single-artist museums in the world, holding around 28,000 of the artist’s works.

Edvard Munch lived to be 80 years old. To say he left behind quite the legacy would be an understatement. It’s almost too easy though, to image a fate in which his life would have ended much sooner. Marred by a tragic childhood, he fit the bill for the classic “tortured artist.” There’s no doubt he would have been considered a prolific figure in modern art, even if he’d left behind a smaller body of work. But, it just so happens Munch’s first foray into printmaking shares a number of similarities with Picasso’s. And if the artist had never made it to the point where he started to make prints, it’s unclear how renowned he would be today, as prints became a major part of his oeuvre. At the time, it was radical to make art about feelings and the soul. But that was part of Munch’s genius: an innate ability to express emotions, and his willingness to boldly experiment with mediums and techniques in order to find fresh ways to convey his feelings.

Munch didn’t get into printmaking until his early 30s. He had already been working as an artist for a decade yet hadn’t achieved major success from his paintings. He moved to Berlin in 1892, as Kristiania wasn’t much of a cultural hub at the time. Just as Picasso struggled financially when he first moved to Paris, Munch’s early days in Berlin were spent poor and hungry.*

Things started to change after Munch put on a small show of his paintings. His work was deemed inappropriate though, and the show was shut down after only a week. A week, however, turned out to be long enough to put him on the map with Berlin’s avant-garde. As his popularity grew, Munch wanted his work to reach a larger number of people— a quest that led him to discover printmaking, and all it had to offer.

Unlike Picasso, though— whose use of the new medium coincided with his use of new subjects and a transition from his blue period to his rose period— Munch didn’t shake his angst and isolation. Instead, he utilized printmaking techniques to rework his motifs and express the emotional atmosphere in new ways.

Trost (Consolation) (W6), a drypoint created in 1894, is a good example of this. Dark shading connects the two lovers to each other, but a distinct line still separates them. While the man is mostly surrounded by light, a dark figure looms over the woman. And just like that, we experience that raw human element; the delicate gloom that exists in so many of Munch’s depictions of love and relationship.** This theme of consolation is one Munch would keep coming back to, a man embracing a woman amidst anguish. The melancholia of these images is unsettling, but the title suggests something more revealing. Consoling is, after all, to alleviate a sense of loss or grief. There is even the notion of consolation as medical intervention; the concept that "Before and after fundamental medicine offers diagnoses, drugs, and surgery to those who suffer, it should offer consolation” and “This comfort may be one person's promise not to abandon another. Consolation may render loss more bearable by inviting some shift in belief about the point of living a life that includes suffering. Thus consolation implies a period of transition: a preparation for a time when the present suffering will have turned.”***

Thinking about consolation alongside the personal grief that fueled the artist’s art, is it possible that even in his darkest moments of despair, he could find an element of human comfort somewhere inside? Could it even be part of the reason he was able to make it through, living his life into old age? Munch said himself, “Naturalism, Impressionism, Symbolism are movements that have become means of expressing a single concern, the human.”

Printmaking was the medium that allowed Munch to distribute his work to the widest audience; work that expressed his sorrow, his fear, his joy, his pain… in essence, his humanity. A humanity that spoke to the people, because they shared in and related to it.  And they continue to feel connected to those works today. Enough so to fill a 13 story museum with them.

* The radical prints of Edvard Munch: 'new ways to express moods and emotions.’ The prints of Edvard Munch | Christie's. April, 9, 2019.

** Prelinger, Elizabeth, et al. The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection. Yale University Press, 1996.
*** Arthur W. Frank, The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

            Last week Picasso stumbled across Hidalgo Arnéra’s printmaking shop while in Vallauris, working on his pottery craft and enjoying life with Jacqueline, away from Paris. There, he learned about the possibilities of a new technique – one that necessitated much less fuss than lithography and etching, which had required him to courier stones and plates to faraway studios. There is carefree Mediterranean warmth and joyous, playful linework in prints like Portrait de Jacqueline aux cheveux lisses (B1066) – above – and Portrait de femme a la fraise et au chapeau (B1145) – below – showcasing Picasso’s inclination for his new skill, the way it seemed to complement the sunning, behatted visages of his post-Parisian life. Of course, there is also color – color used in a way that Picasso only rarely did before in his prints. The history of Picasso’s colored linocuts is a notch in his master printmaker belt – a canto in the tale of his constant reinvention of printmaking techniques.

The story begins with Picasso’s first published linocut, B859, created in 1958. The image is a modernization of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous painting, “Portrait of a Woman” (1564). Picasso stayed quite true to the original — he retained the shadow behind the subject, the corner of curtained backdrop — but took his own liberties with color and shape. Some people say that, in true form, he replaced Cranach’s subject’s face with the unmistakable features of Jacqueline — a believable fiction, if it is one. Though it was a vibrant and widely successful use of a new palette, and is today a print admired, in Picasso’s mind the print’s value was in its challenges.

And the primary challenge he’d faced was in the registration of color. Through all the states he created of B859, he’d had difficulty with it; each color used in the print corresponded to a different sheet of linoleum, which meant that he needed to cut several sheets with the reverse of pieces of the overall image. It was a time-consuming process, tedious. And it would produce a color registration that was less than clean-cut, at that. To reduce the time needed to lay the color, and to enhance the cleanness of the registration, Picasso thought of a shortcut. the “reduction” technique – one credited to his invention and that was cultivated with the support of his printer, Arnéra.

In simplest terms, he found a way to use only one sheet of linoleum on which he could lay down color sequentially, starting first with the largest area and ending with the smallest area. Throughout the process, the surface of the linoleum would be cut down, so that at the end just a very small bit of material would remain – the last color printed. Because the cut-away parts get discarded, there is no way to correct mistakes; the printmaker has one shot. Perhaps it was the thrill of this task, the masterful facility it required, that incited Picasso’s early 1960s spree of colored linocuts.

In any case, the happy result are images like B1066, in which primary color bubbles up like bloom in Jacqueline’s cheeks, like the sun glinting off of one side of her face; and B1145, in which color becomes the planes of her face themselves, her face stamped into Picasso’s imagination in light. It is the deceiving simplicity of these images, their ease and iconography, combined with the inventiveness of the artist which has raised them to a status of genius.

But as always, there was more innovation ahead. Next up, he’d find it in the bathtub. More on that next week.

* Lieberman, William S. Picasso Linoleum Cuts: The Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kramer Collection,

(1985) (pp. 11-12)

Pablo Picasso: Le Singe (The Monkey), 1936, Sugarlift aquatint, drypoint, and scraper, 14 3/8 x 11 inches

When Picasso relocated from the Montmartre-based Bateau Lavoir (shared with Max Jacob, among many other bohemians and artists), he upgraded to the kind of city-center flat affordable to an artist with new money, playing domestic with his then-girlfriend Fernande Olivier. Despite Fernande’s supposedly reigning status in the household, there was only one lady allowed free roam of Picasso’s in-home studio: Monina, his pet monkey.

One can imagine a melancholy Fernande, relatively neglected during this highly productive time in Picasso’s art-making, sighing over her journal as she wrote about Monina, who, “used to eat all her meals with Picasso and pester him incessantly,” though, she admits, “he bore with this and even enjoyed it. He would let her take his cigarette or the fruit he was eating. She would nestle up to his chest, where she felt quite at home.”*

An unexpectedly sweet image: work-absorbed Picasso, punctuating his self-consuming picture-making for a snuggle with his trickster pet monkey. Unlike his other love affairs, Monina is not a major subject of Picasso’s work. Her closest appearance is in Le Singe, a sugarlift aquatint print of a monkey Picasso created later in his career. That monkey is not Monina, but there is a gentle familiarity in its rendering that may speak to an image of her in the artist’s mind – an impression of her, resting against his heart.

It leads me to wonder: what kind of person might be uncovered if we read between the lines of Picasso’s visual diaries? We think we know this artist so well, with his anarchic, larger-than-life persona – but who might we discover if we take a step back from these big narratives, and consider the underdogs of his pictures?

Over the next couple of weeks, we seek to find out.

*Olivier, Fernande. Loving Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2001.