Although Picasso was known for being an insatiable innovator, some of his greatest works drew on his mastery of printing. The majority of the pieces included in Picasso: Creatures and Creativity, the current exhibition at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, demonstrate the 20th-century visionary’s capacity for creating lithographs and linocuts. The 43 pieces, chosen by curator Tatyana Franck, come from the archives of Picasso’s son Claude and share a common characteristic of depicting the human form. The exhibit also includes prints Picasso made of his own paintings, as well as a lithograph series depicting two of the artist’s muses.

The origin of the exhibition dates back to 1998, when Claude Picasso designed the furniture and tapestries for Picasso, Bellagio’s Julian Serrano-helmed restaurant. “So 17 years later, we decided to create a show only with his collection, and the theme of the exhibition is the human figure, as you can see, because it was so important in Picasso’s work,” says Franck. “And we really wanted to show Picasso’s creative process, because what most people do not know is that Picasso was working all the time and really wanted to date each step of his process.”

Prints (unlike painting) allowed Picasso to work fast, as well as show the various stages of a work through its final state. The human figures depicted were often the women he was involved with, and Picasso: Creatures and Creativity provides insight into that part of Picasso’s life while demonstrating his processes.

The exhibition includes Tête á la coiffe, an oil painting of his muse, Françoise Gilot, that he completed April 17, 1945. He then prepared an inverse version on a zinc plate for a lithograph version, (Figure), he printed three days later.

“That’s unique in Picasso’s history,” says Franck. “He never did the exact same figure in two different mediums. He always did similar, but not the same. And we have the original zinc plate that Picasso was working on.” Creatures also includes glimpses into Picasso’s work environment, represented with black-and-white images by photographer David Douglas Duncan, and oil paintings ranging from 1938’s abstract Left Profile of a Woman with Blue Hair to 1965’s reflexive The Painter and his Easel. The latter work is a self-portrait of Picasso painting a canvas finished four days earlier, Reclining Woman.

The artist’s sense of humor, as well as his appreciation of the Masters, is represented again through the five-color linocut series El Greco’s Portrait of a Man with a Ruff, but it’s the 18-state lithograph series Two Nude Women (1945-1946) that is the masterwork of the exhibition. Recently acquired mistress Gilot faces the artist in the foreground as his previous paramour, Dora Maar, reclines and averts her gaze. Both are realistically portrayed at first, but become more abstract with each state as Maar’s figure dissolves. In life his muses would fade, but as Creatures and Creativity demonstrates, in art they would both become immortal and shed light on how he worked as well as how he lived.

Bellagio 10 a.m.-8 p.m. daily, last admission at 7:30 p.m., $17, $14 seniors and Nevada residents, $12 students, children 12 and under free, admission includes audio tour. 702.693.7871