Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne

The Costume design for the ballet Le Tricorne by Pablo Picasso, executed in 1920, is a key piece reflecting the Spanish artist’s deep engagement with modernist theater and the influential Ballets Russes. This work belongs to a significant portfolio classified as an Illustrated Book. Le Tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat) premiered in 1919 and involved a highly creative collaborative period between Picasso, composer Manuel de Falla, and impresario Serge Diaghilev. The resulting designs marked a return to classicism and figuration, contrasting with the fragmentation of the artist's earlier Cubist experiments.

The medium employs collotype and pochoir, a high-quality reproductive process often utilized during the 1920s for accurately disseminating important sketches and designs. The piece is one of thirty-two collotypes published in the portfolio, with thirty-one utilizing the hand-stenciling technique known as pochoir. This hybrid technique allowed for the complex color and textural qualities evident in Picasso’s preparatory sketches to be maintained for the Illustrated Book. Unlike unique original drawings, these high-quality prints served to share Picasso’s stage visions with a broader audience, documenting his pivotal contribution to the production.

Picasso’s involvement in costume and set design following his 1917 trip to Rome was highly consequential, emphasizing a shift in aesthetic focus characteristic of his early 1920s output. The design itself, though abstractly formalized, retains the flavor of the underlying narrative based on Spanish folklore, reflecting the artist’s cultural heritage. This important example of 20th-century artistic collaboration and theatrical design resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Due to the period of creation, high-resolution images and specialized collotype prints from the Le Tricorne portfolio are often made available to the public domain depending on specific international copyright considerations.