Similarly to all the great artists of the twentieth century, Clavé’s practice encompassed a variety of different expressions: painting, sculpture, poster-making, printing, stage design and costumes, and so on.
 
In each and every one of these different facets, he left his personal stamp and evidence of his constant experimentation into various techniques. This can be most readily seen in his work with printing, where he mixed processes which had hitherto been considered incompatible, eschewing the repetition so common in this field, otherwise largely focused on the commercialisation of the work of art.
 
In 1939, soon after arriving to Paris with the wave of political exiles following the Spanish Civil War, a Catalan friend advised him to take up lithography, given the greater ease to sell editions because of their lower cost.
 
By chance he ended up working with Edmond Desjobert, who had one of the most important workshops in Paris. Desjobert taught him this technique and Clavé made his first lithographs there. He was totally won over, but his insatiable curiosity and the fact that he made very short editions meant that the experience turned out to be an economic failure. Nevertheless, after much intense work in this field he acquired consummate control over the technique, and he went on to win the Gran Prix Unesco for engraving at the XXVIII Venice Biennale in 1956, which was followed by many other awards.
 
After learning all there was to know about the lithograph technique he started to experiment with other printing processes, like (1965), and then soon afterwards carborundum (1968), a process that opened up new possibilities for manipulating the plates. His endeavour to keep innovating distanced him from orthodox expressions and even led him to include in the same plate various processes that would initially seem incompatible: carborundum, , , , printing on aluminium plate (1972), which he combined experimentally and whose end results he continued to modify with new overlayered editions or collages, folds, tearing, and so on.
 
Clavé is one of the few artists who addressed his prints specifically as a printer and not as a painter who was transferring his painting to a printing process. To this end, he used materials with great power and strength.