Having created over 2,400 prints, Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) is considered the most prolific engraver of the 20th century. According to Brigitte Baer, who compiled the catalogue raisonné of his prints, the artist had a deep passion for printmaking. The technical expertise and artisanal knowhow needed to create prints particularly interested him. But to etch, to paint a lithographic zinc plate or to carve a lino block, one needs a flawless technique and the help of a printer, indeed a true craftsman is required to run the sheet off the press. It is also difficult to create a moving etching; anyone can play around with a stylus on a copper plate, but to create, to reveal emotions through a print is both demanding and delicate. It was precisely these challenges that captivated Picasso, who confronted artists such as Cranach, Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya and Munch, who incidentally are also considered the greatest masters of printmaking. However, Picasso is a modern artist, eager and impatient. He never ceased to break artistic boundaries and to explore new printing techniques, subjecting them to his own desires, even if it meant manhandling them. This ability to avoid established cannons and methods has been pointed out by all the craftsmen with whom he worked, and linocutting, the art of engraving on a block of linoleum, was no exception.

Picasso practiced linocutting abundantly, in collaboration with Hidalgo Arnéra (1922-2007), the young printer with whom he worked for fourteen years. Only just under 200 subjects, among Picasso’s known prints are linocuts. Except for two of them, all these linocuts were created between 1954 and 1968, when Picasso was in his 80s. Even though the artist created most of them once he had left Vallauris, the linocuts are closely associated with the small town. Only 7 - 16 blocks – or plates – were cut in Vallauris; the others were cut at La Californie in Cannes, at the château of Vauvenargues and at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins. However, all the sheets were printed in Vallauris at the Arnéra press named after its owner. Contrary to his Spanish-sounding first name, Hidalgo Arnéra was of Italian not of Spanish origin. His father was a printer and it was in his workshop that the young Hidalgo mastered his trade. During the war he was sent to Austria for compulsory labour service, where he learnt the linocut technique. The first meeting between Arnéra and Picasso dates to 1948, at the Nérolium, the venue where the Vallauris ceramics fairs were held, but it was in 1954, for the Toros poster, that their collaboration truly took shape. 

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Mainly associated with the fields of commercial printing and education, and until then considered a minor art, linocut gained its reputation with Picasso. By revealing the capacities, refinements, and subtleties of linocutting, Picasso created powerful works and enabled the medium to affirm itself as an art in its own right.  Consequently, posters and artistic linocuts were the object of limited editions respectively published by Association des potiers de Vallauris and the Louise Leiris gallery in Paris; they were collected by private individuals and museums all around the world.

Once again, the artist mastered a technique in order to expand it. It was a conquest he would not have been able to attain without the help of Arnéra. Indeed, he found in the young printer the ideal companion for experimentation, one totally devoted, who made his skill as a draftsman and his extensive knowledge of linoleum available to him. Nor should one forget the pleasure the artist had in sharing the act of creating, a pleasure little mentioned but which is present in all his collaborations. Arnéra felt it, experienced it and appreciated it. It is the pleasure of an ordinary life based on work and going beyond one’s limits, with simplicity and camaraderie. A daily pleasure that Picasso enjoyed with other craftsmen in Vallauris and in a sense, with the town itself, and which is a testament to his attachment to this community.

N.B.: Hidalgo Arnéra was very surprised and impressed at the ease with which Picasso understood and acquired a sense for linoleum. Interview between Hildalgo Arnéra and Anne-Françoise Gavanon in June 2004 at Vallauris. Information in relation to the working relationship between Picasso and Arnéra has equally been gathered during this interview.