Nigeria, Feb. 18 -- This is Pablo Picasso the way he is rarely seen - at least in so far as the hundred or so pieces at the British Museum's Picasso: Printmaker have been displayed. The viewer is treated to dazzling marked draughtsmanship that also evinces a mastery of techniques: the use of drypoint and etching, lithographs, linocuts and aquatints.

The span of the work humbles.From the early 1900s (Picasso moved to Paris in 1904, keeping an address at the Washhouse Boat in Montmartre), we find the almost shockingA Frugal Meal, where the much-diminished couple sits together in strained impoverishment, their minds abstracted by distance from each other. Struck by malnutrition, we see the sagging bodies, the skeletal fingers, the piece of ...