When Picasso, Miró and Dalí meet in print

All three came from Spain, and not one of them saw a print as a copy of a painting, so every sheet was made for the stone or metal plate, with Picasso getting a whole face into a few lines and Miró and Dalí having fun with colour

Grey shavings lay scattered across a table at CMYK in New Delhi as guests bent over small carving blocks, one woman cutting a strange tall figure into hers and signing it Dalí, while a roller heavy with black ink brought a pale Picasso signature out of the dark.

The workshop sat beside the real thing, Picasso, Miró and Dalí: Master Impressions, Original Lithographs and Etchings, on at the art and design bookstore, where more than 60 prints hang, all signed and numbered by the artists.

All three treated printmaking as serious work, often side by side with the great master printers of their day. Picasso’s Portrait de Femme II, a 1955 lithograph from an edition of only 50, with one held at MoMA in New York, shows Jacqueline Roque, his muse and later wife, looking aside with a large dark eye under a net of cross-hatched hair. Miró fills his sheets with playful signs and soft, swelling shapes, and Dalí brings fine drawing and rich colour to scenes that slip into dreams.

Presented by CMYK, the show comes from the bookstore’s growing interest in collecting, and Kapil and Priya Kapoor, who run Roli Books and CMYK, hope it shows Indian audiences a less familiar side of three names everyone knows.