PICASSO'S LEGACY

PICASSO'S LATE STYLE

PICASSO'S APPROACH TO PAINTING

PICASSO'S LAST DECADES IN REVIEW

PICASSO'S APPROACHES TO PRINTMAKING

PICASSO'S APPROACH TO PAINTING

Despite Picasso's dismissal of self-conscious technique, his work reveals a master craftsman and a lover of paint. Oil paint, gloss enamel paint, brilliant white primed canvases, diluent used freely to thin paint and dripping thick lines combine to produce a variety of effects. By 1953 Picasso had full command over his painting skills, but began each new work with the same need to experiment and push his materials to perform new tricks.

Matte painting had become synonymous with modernity by the mid-twentieth century. It represented a key departure from the tradition of oil-rich paint layers and varnished surfaces of nineteenth century academic painting. Picasso's late works featured absorbent matte surfaces of thinned oil paint through which the luminous white priming was visible. Light for Picasso came from within the painting.

Like Cézanne, passages of uncovered primed canvas were left by Picasso to function as volume-creating highlights. As he saw it: 'White was solid, it allowed the other colours to breathe, to expand.' Ripolin household enamel paint was one of Picasso's more successful technical innovations. He influenced others to take up this glossy, quick drying, contrasting medium, including Jackson Pollock and Sidney Nolan.

Picasso employed a dazzling array of surface textures in his late works. Scumbling: roughly dabbing in opaque, pasty pigments with a stiff hogs-hair brush thinly enough to reveal lower paint layers and give added luminosity. Sgraffito: using the handle end of his brush, scratching back through wet paint to reveal lower paint layers, a kind of drawing in reverse we associate more with printmaking than painting techniques.

Many of his late works were monochrome, but Picasso could suggest a full palette of colours using only the subtlest gradations of black, white and grey half tones. At the same time he made bold Matissean statements in ultramarine or rich viridian greens, and experimented with a new range of stridently vivid synthetic pigments originally developed for the car industry.

Working fast, producing up to three canvases in a single day, Picasso allowed the lightning process of editing and changes to his compositions to remain visible. Detectable shifts in the density, tempo and direction of brushwork or the flow of paint allow us to experience Picasso's working process, mirrored in quick, physical actions.