Like Picasso's earlier productive collaborative relationships with the master printers Roger Lacourière (1892-1966) and Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988), Picasso’s experimental foray into the medium of linocut was in part stimulated by his new love interest.  He had met Hidalgo Arnéra (1922-2007), who specialized in printing newspapers and posters, not long after relocating to the town of Vallauris on the Côte d’Azur from Paris at the end of the 1940s.  In 1951, when Picasso was invited to create a poster to advertise the town’s annual art exhibition, Arnéra suggested that he use linocut, which is relatively easy to cut and print and can easily accommodate text, making it ideal for poster design.  Following Arnéra’s advice, Picasso went on to create a series of linocut posters in the early and mid 1950s, advertising local art exhibitions and bullfights in which he explored the graphic potential of the medium for producing dramatic and eye-catching images.  

The artist’s first independent linocut was Portrait of a Young Girl, after Cranach the Younger, made in 1958.  Following this, Jacqueline’s famously exotic profile quickly appeared on his linoleum blocks.  A master of linear reduction, Picasso discovered that linocut perfectly suited his desire to pare his images down to their most powerful and simplified form.  Ever since his academic training at the end of the previous century, the artist had been combining his technical mastery of classical methods with a free use of his imagination and invention.  During his years of radical innovation in the language of representation in the early decades of the twentieth century, Picasso continued his habit of making more traditional forms of drawing, maintaining countless sketchbooks with an almost diaristic function.  Developing his own personal style, Picasso fused the graphic technique of refining an image to bold elemental line that he had learned working as an illustrator in the 1900s with an expressionism he had adapted through his interest in primitivism.