From the sign to the double image: landscape / face-face / landscape, about some prints by Picasso
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1344/waterfront2022.64.7.01Keywords:
printmaking, landscape, signs, symbols, anthropomorphisation, perception, PicassoAbstract
Regarding part of Picasso's graphic work derived both from gestural poetics, which paradigm is the artist's book Le chant des morts, and from the plastic description with signs that make the topography of faces and portraits such as that of Balzac, we can see how, with these same elements, he generates a particular lithographic chorography dedicated to the village of Vallauris. With the same scripture, he constructed two very different topics: faces and landscapes. Motifs which he unites in a single composition with a double reading: both a face and a landscape can be seen, or the other way round, depending on how you look at it, such as the linoleum Tête de femme au chapeau/Paisage aux baigneuses, a printmaking technique which Picasso not only innovated but also gave it an entity of its own, parallel to the ancestral woodcut.
Anthropomorphising the landscape is a resource linked to a long and ancient tradition in painting, from the early symbolists to Arcimboldo, and from him to the 20th-century avant-garde and surrealists such as Magritte, Cocteau, Man Ray, etc. Similarly, in the history of printmaking, whether cultured, popular or functional, double images proliferated very early on in the description of the territory through figures bearing attributes referring to the areas, linked to mythology, religion or the significance of the name of the place, a good example being the woodcut maps of H. Bünting in the book Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae.
The symbolic interpretation of these works, and especially the double or inverse reading, has the particularity of transferring to the spectator the difficult problem of choosing one direction or the other, becoming a singular question of perceptual priority that often responds to the of which everything depends on how you look at it.
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