This 1953 lithograph by Pablo Picasso, Femme à L'Italienne d'après le tableau de Victor Orsel (Bloch 740), exemplifies his dialogue with art history and his technical mastery of the lithographic medium. Executed with scraper technique and printed on fine Arches paper with its distinctive watermark, the work reveals how Picasso could reinterpret historical paintings through his own modernist lens, blending reverence for tradition with bold experimentation.

Lithography was one of Picasso’s most prolific printmaking techniques, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s, when he collaborated extensively with Fernand Mourlot’s atelier in Paris. Unlike etching or linocut, lithography allows for painterly softness, tonal depth, and a direct transfer of gesture to the stone. In this print, Picasso also employs the scraper technique, a method that involves scratching back into the inked surface to create highlights and textures.

The use of Arches paper with its watermark is significant: this fine French paper was highly prized for its durability and ability to capture both delicate tonal gradations and sharp graphic contrasts. Here, it supports the deep blacks and subtle greys that make the figures luminous and sculptural.

At the center of the composition stands the Italian woman, rendered with frontal dignity and classical stillness. Her rounded face, direct gaze, and solid presence anchor the image, recalling the solemnity of Orsel’s 19th-century original. Yet around her, Picasso introduces an energetic cast of surrounding figures—mythological, sensual, and expressive.

To the left, a nude female figure rises with elongated elegance, echoing both classical statuary and Picasso’s own explorations of the female form. Above, a faun plays a flute, and to the right, a Dionysian figure raises a jug, their wild, expressive gestures contrasting with the calm, monumental central figure. The juxtaposition creates a dynamic tension between order and exuberance, control and abandon, a hallmark of Picasso’s reworkings of classical themes.

What distinguishes this lithograph is Picasso’s command of tonal range and textural variation. Using lithographic crayon, ink, and the scraper, he creates a surface that feels simultaneously drawn and sculpted. The shadows of the central figure’s dress, the highlights of her face, and the expressive white scratches of the satyr’s features show how Picasso treated the lithographic stone as a living surface, not simply a means of reproduction.

His reimagining of Orsel’s work is less about copying and more about transformation. By inserting mythological figures and by intensifying tonal contrasts, he turns a 19th-century academic subject into a composition alive with modernist vitality and psychological resonance.

Throughout his career, Picasso often engaged in dialogues with earlier artists—Velázquez, Delacroix, Cranach, Manet—absorbing and reinterpreting their imagery. These reinterpretations were not mere homages but radical re-imaginings that allowed Picasso to assert both continuity with tradition and his own artistic supremacy. In Femme à L’Italienne, Orsel’s original portrait becomes a springboard for Picasso to explore contrasts between stability and chaos, classicism and modernism, the sacred and the profane.

Femme à L'Italienne d'après Victor Orsel (Bloch 740) is a remarkable demonstration of Picasso’s lithographic brilliance and his lifelong dialogue with the art of the past. Using scraper techniques on Arches paper, he achieves a composition of tonal richness and expressive dynamism, where the central Italian woman stands as a serene anchor amid surrounding mythological revelry.

This lithograph embodies Picasso’s unique ability to both honor tradition and disrupt it, reaffirming his place as a modern master who constantly redefined what it meant to engage with the history of art.