Richard Hamilton: Picasso's meninas

Richard Hamilton’s contribution to this print portfolio in homage to Picasso was Picasso’s Las Meninas, an etching with aquatint on white paper. It was printed by Aldo Crommelynck, the master printer with whom Picasso had worked on the production of most of his prints over the course of twenty years. In this print Hamilton transforms Velázquez into Picasso and replaces the original figures in the painting with others in the different styles in which Picasso worked. Thus we see the Blue and Pink Periods, classicism and expressionism. Using a wide range of Picasso’s techniques, including free washes of aquatint, Hamilton brings together and fuses all the different idioms used by Picasso in a single image that had also inspired Picasso: Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

In Picasso’s Las Meninas Hamilton combines allusions that unite the past with the present and art with literature, using numerous changes of style within one composition in order to pay personal tribute to Picasso while also revealing his profound admiration for Velázquez and the influence that James Joyce exercised on his thought.

In 1971 the Austrian writer and critic Wieland Schmied invited artists from around the world to produce a graphic work for the portfolio Hommage à Picasso, to be published by Propyläen Verlag, Berlin. This idea, which is unique in the history of the print, was intended to celebrate the 90th birthday of the great 20th-century artist who had taken printmaking to a new and universal level. In the end, the project was not published until 1973, as a result of which it became one of the earliest posthumous tributes to Picasso. Hamilton, Hockney and artists as diverse as Joan Miró and Andy Warhol were involved in this homage, along with sixty more.