Pablo Picasso

In 1968, when Picasso was eighty-six years old, a period (from March 16 to October 5) of enormous activity in terms of engraving began again; The result is the creation of three hundred and forty-seven works in two hundred and four days of activity, in which he engraved up to seven copper sheets in a single day. The series of The Painter at Work and La Celestina , the last book illustrated by Picasso, correspond to this stage, whose autobiographical tendency has always been insisted upon. The series of 347 engravings was made by the artist from Malaga between March 16 and October 8, 1968, already in his old age, constituting the largest set of individual engravings in the series made throughout his life. Dedicated to his great friend Jaime Sabartés, Picasso did not name it although he did name the engravings individually. It was shown to the general public for the first time in 1970 at the 'Gallerie Louis Leiris' in Paris and later at the 'Art Institute of Chicago'. For its realization, Picasso counted on the engraving brothers Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, who established an etching recording workshop near Picasso's residence in Mougins, where Picasso experimented with the possibilities of a process that had fascinated him, combining different techniques. in etching and aquatint with resins and sugar as well as with drypoint, achieving great virtuosity and a conceptual 'reinvention', already initiated with the two-dimensional nature of cubism, through the mastery of ink and synthesis in black and white, in all types of dimensions and sizes. It is a series full of eroticism, in which the world of voyeurism even appears through characters inserted in the engravings, which made sexually explicit engravings in a city like Paris, in a mentally open society like France. were exhibited in closed private rooms, only accessible to adults after warning the public of what they would find there. (Source: Patio Herreriano Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art)