Lecture: Conversing with the Masters: Variation as an Artistic Process in Picasso’s Work

Susan Grace Galassi, Senior Curator, The Frick Collection
January 21, 2017

Throughout his seven-decade career, Picasso conducted artistic dialogues with his predecessors, even as he continually innovated and invented new formal languages. The tension of this push and pull is made explicit in his variations on works of the past. Tracing this process from youth to old age in selected examples, Galassi considers the ways in which the collaborative nature of printmaking added new dimensions to Picasso’s engagement with the past, opening the way to his final grand series.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition States of Mind: Picasso Lithographs 1945–1960.