States of Mind: Picasso Lithographs 1945–1960

By the mid-1940s, Pablo Picasso had reached what he called “the moment… when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.” 

This new interest in “movement” —the process or evolution of an artistic statement— found its most remarkable expression in Picasso’s practice as a printmaker. Where oil paintings inevitably covered their tracks, concealing the process of their making, prints promised to record their own development through sequential stages, charting the movement of their maker’s thoughts from state to state. 

Drawing on the Norton Simon Museum’s extraordinary collection of Picasso proofs and prints —one of the deepest in North America— this exhibition traces the evolution of individual compositions from the 1940s and 1950s through multiple states, subtle adjustments and radical revisions.

Exhibition overview from Museum website