Picasso: At work, on the clock

THE artist is running out of ink; the cinematographer is running out of film. The result is a fast-paced seven-minute clip from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film “The Mystery of Picasso,” in which an ebullient, bare-chested Pablo Picasso tries to complete a series of overlapping images -- flowers become part of a chicken, which morphs into a fanciful face -- before the clock runs out.

The clip plays repeatedly on a flat screen as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition “Picasso’s Greatest Print: The Minotauromachy in All Its States,” through Feb. 25.

Stephanie Barron, the museum’s senior curator of modern art, says it gives insight into his process, “a very rare opportunity to actually see Picasso at work, and specifically working on a drawing

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-- Diane Haithman