The Couple, 1956
The Couple, 1956
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Medium: Pochoir on Heavy Wove Watermarked Paper
Edition No.: 66/200
Signed in plate, upper left
Printer/Publisher: Daniel Jacomet & Cie, Paris
Dimensions: 19.5" x 15" (31" x 27.5" with frame)
Between the years of 1946 and 1956, Pablo Picasso pulled concepts from his earlier creations, a series of drawings and watercolor, in order to form The Couple (1956). The theme of “The Couple”, omnipresent throughout Picasso’s career, became virtually an obsession toward the end of his life. The real nature of the tender or violent scenes of couples usually portrayed in a simplistic manner and often straightforward approach shows how much importance sexual love had for the artist.
Pablo Picasso chose pochoir as a technique over two-hundred times, both at the beginning and the end of his career. A refined stencil-based technique, pochoir is characterized by its crisp lines and brilliant colors, producing images that have a wet appearance. Pochoir begins with the analysis of the composition, including color tones and densities, of a color image. Numerous stencils were designed as a means of creating an image. The stencils were made of aluminum, copper, or zinc and would be cut with a straight-edged knife. The initial layers would be created with watercolor washes and the final marks applied with soft, opaque gouache, a process termed “lean to fat”. The images were further refined in an effort to create the most vivid, colored works on paper. Pochoir was most popular from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, its center of activity in Paris.
In the collection of :
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY
Dallas Museum of Art (DMA)
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