Screenshot of the Picasso: Themes and Variations website

When you think about printmaking, the Web may not be the first thing that comes to mind. You may envision instead old etching presses, or heavy lithographic stones, or stacks of paper waiting to hit the press. But in fact, MoMA’s Prints Department has long been interested in using the Web as a way of sharing information: using animated, interactive multimedia components as a way to make the material come alive. Our online projects are all available on MoMA.org, from our earliest experiments all the way back in 1998 with Miró’s Black and Red Series… Read more

Pablo Picasso. After Rembrandt: Ecce Homo. 1970, published 1978. Etching and aquatint. The Museum of Modern Art. The Edgar Wachenheim III Fund, 2009. © 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There are lots of reasons why a work might be acquired for MoMA’s collection. Sometimes, the intense preparations for an upcoming exhibition provide a great opportunity to step back, take a careful look at what we already have, and see if there are gaps that need to be filled in our holdings of an artist’s work. This was recently the case as we researched an upcoming exhibition that, along with an accompanying catalogue and website, will explore Pablo Picasso’s creative process through the lens of printmaking. We took a close look at MoMA’s Picasso prints by theme, by technique, and by chronology, and discovered that we didn’t have a strong enough representation of Picasso’s late period (from about 1965 to his death in 1973), which has often been overlooked and underappreciated. Read more