Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne

Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne by Pablo Picasso, created in 1920, exemplifies the Spanish artist's profound engagement with theater and modern design in the post-World War I era. This specific print is drawn from a limited-edition portfolio designed to document the influential ballet, which premiered under Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1919. As a component of the larger Illustrated Book classification, this piece showcases Picasso’s prolific output beyond painting and sculpture, reflecting his embrace of robust, classicizing forms that characterized his return to order phase around 1920.

The technique utilized for this vibrant representation is collotype and pochoir, a sophisticated reproduction method popular in the early 20th century for its ability to capture subtle tonal ranges and rich, hand-applied color. Collotype provided the foundational photographic image, while pochoir—a stencil-based coloring process—added the brilliant hues essential for visualizing stage designs. Picasso’s original costume designs for the production of Le Tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat) were pivotal in merging avant-garde visual art with dance. These concepts were inspired by traditional Spanish folk attire, yet abstracted and modernized through a synthesis of Cubist geometry and classical proportion, demonstrating the artist’s unique capacity to rework historical forms for a contemporary stage.

This work is one of thirty-two collotypes in the complete portfolio held within the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Although the original performance was ephemeral, documentation such as this set of prints ensures the endurance of Picasso's theatrical vision and the history of modern ballet. As an integral piece of modernist visual culture from the period, the image highlights the cross-disciplinary collaboration that defined the era. Given the age and significance of the original publication, high-resolution prints of this material are frequently made available through public domain initiatives, allowing wider access to Picasso's significant graphic work.