Picasso: Printmaker review – filthy fairytales of sex, death and the fascist abyss

British Museum, London
Picasso defiled the refined genre of fine art prints with brutal images of violence and desecration, in one case portraying a bearded artist relaxing with his best mate the Minotaur

Pablo Picasso had a lot on, from shattering the western pictorial tradition with cubism to making sculptures from string and gloves. Why did he also produce a lifetime’s worth of fine art prints? Right through this show we see how he took on this refined genre in order to defile it, rubbing art history in the muck while giving it perverse, indestructible new life.

The desecration begins with his 1905 print Salomé. Herod watches dead-eyed as Salomé dances naked, but Picasso lets us see more than the Biblical King as Salomé raises her left leg high in the air like a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. Already Picasso is depicting the body, as he said he wanted to, “like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels”.