The Bath (Au Bain) 1930

Picasso made this etching, "The Bath", with a plate and sheet of paper, and a whole load of cross-hatching! It’s like he's using lines to sculpt the figure out of thin air. Look at how the density of the lines changes, creating shadows and volume. There's this incredible tension between the detailed, almost frantic mark-making on the figure in the foreground, and the ghostly outline of the figure behind. It reminds me of the way you can rework and rework an area of a painting, building it up and scraping it back, until you find the form. Notice how the lines on the forward figure are so active and full of energy, whereas the lines of the background figure are fainter and just sort of disappear into the ground of the paper. The overall effect is that you want to reach out and touch the image to see if it will dissapear. The German artist Käthe Kollwitz did similar work, exploring what could be achieved with the humble etching. For both artists, art is an experiment, a back-and-forth of ideas.