New Delhi, Sep 27 Pablo Picasso’s “Portrait de Femme II”, depicting one of his defining subjects and later wife, Jacqueline Roque, is a study in the artist’s exploration of line and form.
The 1955 lithograph, hanging as the centrepiece of CMYK’s “Master Impressions” exhibition here, shows Roque with a long, straight nose, the characteristically almond-shaped eye, and a dark mass of hair while demonstrating the role of lithography within the master artist’s practice.
The exhibition, which opened on September 24, brings together over 60 original graphic works by three of the twentieth century’s most influential artists – Picasso, Joan Miro and Salvador Dali – exploring a significant but lesser-known aspect of the artists’ practices: printmaking.
“At CMYK, books remain at the heart of what we do, but our interests increasingly extend into the wider world of collecting that surrounds them – from rare books and limited editions to original graphic works by artists.
“The exhibition is part of this continuing exploration, introducing audiences and collectors in India to an important side of the practices of artists whose work is universally familiar, while offering a closer look at their achievements in lithography and etching,” Kapil and Priya Kapoor, Directors of Roli Books and CMYK, said in a statement.
Picasso, who approached lithography as an independent medium, worked with the master printer Fernand Mourlot and produced some of the most significant lithographs of his career.
“Portrait de Femme II”, printed by Mourlot and published by Galerie Louise Leiris, was issued in an edition of only 50 signed and numbered impressions.
The exhibition also features Picasso’s depiction of Belgian farcical play “Le Cocu Magnifique” through six distinct etchings from 1968.
“Rather than providing literal illustrations, Picasso translates the play’s emotional tensions into a series of stark, theatrical images in which figures, bodies and gestures are charged with eroticism, conflict and psychological intensity,” according to the exhibition catalogue.
The exhibition features original works conceived specifically for these mediums, produced in limited editions, individually numbered and signed by the artists, the organisers said.
Dali’s “Tear of Time” revisits one of his most enduring images: the melting watch, first made famous in “The Persistence of Memory” (1931).
The soft watch, draped over the branch of a barren tree, became “a surrealist symbol of the elasticity of time, memory and perception”.
The exhibition also features works from Dali’s experimental graphic project, “Imaginations and Objects of the Future”, that look towards a world transformed by science and technology.
Colour lithographs from 1975 including “Anti-Umbrella with Atomized Liquid”, “Cyclopean Make-Up”, “Breathing Pneumatic Armchair”, and “Intra-Uterine Paradisiac Locomotion” depict fantastical inventions of Dali’s curious mind.
“The series is also technically adventurous, bringing together lithography, etching, screenprinting and, in several works, collage. The result is a distinctly Dalinian vision of the future, where scientific possibility and the irrational imagination coexist,” the catalogue reads.
The exhibition also features works from his “Sports”, “L’Aventure Médicale”, “Florals”, “Papillons Anciennes”, “Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel”, and “The Twelve Apostles (Knights of the Round Table)” series.
“Blending religious iconography with the pageantry and symbolism suggested by its alternative title, ‘Knights of the Round Table’, this suite of twelve lithographs shows Dalí reimagining sacred figures through his own highly distinctive visual language,” the catalogue described the series.
Dali’s “Les Caprices de Goya” sees him directly engage with Francisco Goya’s celebrated late-eighteenth-century series “Los Caprichos”.
Nearly two centuries after Goya, Dali revisited all 80 images from the series, five of which make it to the exhibition, through his own graphic interventions, including drypoint, etching, aquatint and colour.
A total of 15 works of Miro from his ‘Album 13’ and ‘Album 19’ portfolios form part of the exhibition.
The monochromatic works in ‘Album 13’, printed by the renowned Mourlot Frères in Paris, feature Miró’s fluid black lines, abstract signs, biomorphic forms and fantastical figures and reflect his interest in automatism and spontaneous mark-making.
Human figures, birds, stars and imaginary creatures appear in the set of lithographs, creating compositions that feel at once “playful, mysterious and intensely alive”.
Created more than a decade after ‘Album 13’, ‘Album 19’ shows Miró expanding the same intensely personal language of signs and biomorphic forms through colour.
“Across the portfolio, vivid fields of red, blue, yellow and green interact with bold black lines and freely drawn shapes, creating compositions that seem at once spontaneous and carefully balanced,” the catalogue reads.
Presented together for the first time in India, “Master Impressions” offers an opportunity to encounter, and acquire, the original lithographs and etchings by the three master modernists.
The exhibition will come to a close on November 22.
(PTI News)
