In tandem with the aesthetic qualities of Jacqueline au Bandeau, this rare bronze also memorialises an often-overlooked aspect of Picasso’s contribution to art: his revolution of the linocut.

Great artists have always been drawn to the possibilities afforded by the printed medium. Since its fifteenth century invention, figures such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrant van Rijn and William Hogarth had successively shown that images of great inventive quality could be disseminated to a far wider audience than the constraints of painting allowed. Between woodcuts, etchings, and engravings, the medium quickly demonstrated itself to be a locus for pictorial innovation rather than a subsidiary to the ‘higher’ arts. Yet until the early twentieth century, the years of training needed to successfully work copper or wooden plates presented a significant barrier to entry for most artists; this would change with the emergence of the linocut.

Appearing around 1910, the linocut immediately offered significant advantages over the traditional medium of the woodcut. Softer and with no directional grain, linoleum (shortened to lino) allowed untrained artists to cut designs into its pliable surface, which were then easily and quickly printed on a single press. Yet, in its early years, artists turned away from the new medium due to its simplicity. As Karshan argues, in its early years ‘the linocut was considered too limited, too unsophisticated a method to be used by mature artists’. While Henri Matisse and Juan Mirò’s use of the technique somewhat helped its reputation, the pared down, monochromatic imagery they produced in lino still represented a medium in its infancy.

It therefore fell to Picasso to fundamentally overturn this perception. Picasso pioneered the reduction method; he carved and then printed a partial composition in a single colour, before more lino was cut away, and repeat printing in the next colour was imposed on top. This represented a radical departure from the previous norm which required multiple sheets of lino – each used to print a single colour.

Scholarship strongly emphasises that Picasso effectively created the modern colour linocut as we know it - before this, there had been no complete proofs of a work after printing - just the multiple separate linoleum sheets that constitute the different colours. As Donald Karshan, the foremost expert on Picasso’s linocuuts, argues ‘with the one-block method, the artist can view and correct the work only as it develops progressively. He cannot backtrack. This irrevocability of the creative process and its results are unique in the graphic arts, and perhaps without analogy in the other art forms’.

Thus, understanding Picasso’s revolutionary relationship with the linocut is crucial to appreciating what Jacqueline au Bandeau represents: an almost unique physical imprint of technical innovation. Furthermore, not only did this invention set the stage for the modern relationship between painters and printing, but more personally it allowed Picasso to disseminate the imagery of what was perhaps the most fruitful year of his career. As Karshan puts it, for an eighty year-old artist to have still prioritised technical innovation is nothing less than ‘a reflection of the extraordinary wherewithal and confidence of the aging master’.

Picasso chose to memorialise this image of Jacqueline au Bandeau in bronze not solely to preserve one of his favourite linocut series, but because he also recognised the fundamental applicability of bronze to his project of multiple perspectives. The bronze sculptural imprint of a three-dimensional linocut intended to produce two-dimensional images can be seen as an encapsulation of the hybridisation of painting and sculpture that lies at the heart of Picasso’s work. From his earliest cubist forays into bronzes, Picasso’s engagement with varied media would only grow throughout his career, and by the early 1960s he was producing a wide range of ceramics, silverware, sheet-metal sculptures and bronzes to complement his prints, drawings, and paintings: many of which centred around his visions of Jacqueline. It is out of this context of varied production that Jacqueline au Bandeau emerged.

Picasso clearly felt that he had achieved something special in this composition, for he would ensure that it was reproduced across multiple media throughout a two-year period. First came the prints themselves, a series of fifty linocuts entitled Femme aux Cheveux Flous, which the artist would release in 1962, as part of his turn towards the more direct style which would characterise the last decade of his career. Yet the success of this individual composition would lead the artist to expand the material possibilities of the series, in 1964 he would release a series of one-hundred earthenware casts of the original lino block, alongside two editions cast in bronze. Not only did the return to this image demonstrate how much Picasso favoured the subject, but the fact that artist had kept the original printing block for over two years (when this would typically be discarded) seems to confirm his high opinion of this particular work.

The very act of casting the linocut transformed it from ancillary object to objet d’art, physicalising his work in bronze. While Picasso had done much to break down the binary between decorative and fine art, the gulf of importance between a bronze sculpture and a printed multiple still remained significant.

Jacqueline au Bandeau thus testifies to three of the most important features of Picasso’s late career: the extent of his experimental output, his continual refinement of Jacqueline as a subject, and his reinvention of the linocut. In memorialising this linocut in bronze, Picasso made a statement expressing not only the importance he attributed to his printmaking but the individual quality of this composition.