Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne

Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne by Pablo Picasso, created in 1920, offers a compelling illustration of the Spanish artist’s pivotal involvement in theatrical production and his subsequent shift toward Neoclassical aesthetics. This work is technically a collotype and pochoir print, classified as an Illustrated Book, signifying its function not as a unique drawing but as one page from an extensive portfolio. The complete publication comprised thirty-two collotypes, thirty-one of which were enhanced by the hand-coloring technique of pochoir to vividly capture the intended palette of the original designs.

The print serves as a document of one of the most significant artistic collaborations of the period: the 1919 premiere of Le Tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat), commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. Picasso was responsible for the set and costume designs, collaborating with choreographer Léonide Massine and composer Manuel de Falla. Drawing upon his cultural heritage, the Spanish artist imbued the designs with Iberian character, blending the geometric structure absorbed from his Cubist period with a return to classicizing figures typical of his work in the early 1920s.

The collotype process enabled the faithful reproduction of the underlying drawing, while the layered stencils of the pochoir technique ensured that the resulting prints retained the bold, flat fields of color essential to the stage designs. This process was vital for distributing and documenting the highly influential theatrical concepts for the ballet. This particular print is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). As seminal works from the early 1920s, high-quality prints of designs like Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne remain critical resources for understanding Modernist stage design.