Lithograph
Signed (lower right)
Edition 244/350
h75.8 x w59.8cm (excluding frame)

Provenance:
Halcyon Gallery, London, October 2015, where purchased by the present owner

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, ceramicist, designer, playwright, and poet, Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) is unquestionably one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century. He created several of the great masterpieces of modernism, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), co-invented collage and Cubism, designed groundbreaking sets and costumes for the theatre and invented assemblage sculpture. Driven by boundless artistic energies and ambitions, he came to personify the avant-garde, and many of the movements of the last century could not help but develop in his orbit, as artists worked consciously either to absorb his influence or rebel in his shadow.

Born in Málaga, Spain, Picasso began painting and drawing under the tutelage of his father, the painter and school art teacher, José Ruiz Blasco. Picasso proved to be a child prodigy, and studied formally at art schools in Barcelona and Madrid. He first visited Paris in 1901, settling there permanently in 1904. Picasso was influenced by the Modernisme movement in Barcelona and by Post-Impressionism and the Fauves in Paris, yet quickly developed variations distinctly his own.

Early in his career Picasso’s styles and subjects developed in tandem: the poverty in which he and his friends lived manifested in the ‘Blue Period’ (1901–04); circus performers, harlequins, and the blush of love informed the ‘Rose Period’ (1904–06). But for the remainder of his career, his essential subjects were human perception itself, the mysteries of representation, and his own creativity. An interest in indigenous African and Polynesian sculpture began to shape the way he depicted volume and mass in the proto-Cubist period that led to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. With fellow artist, Georges Braque, he incorporated the lessons of Paul Cézanne’s work, cinematic scene-cutting, and the uncanny improvisations of collage and assemblage, to forge the most radical approach to depicting spatial relationships since the Renaissance: Analytic Cubism (1909–12) and Synthetic Cubism (1912–19). These experiments would form the foundation of an idiom that would permeate his work across all mediums and changes in style for the next fifty years.

The 1920s saw further developments in Cubism; a reflection of his Mediterranean heritage in a muscular, idiosyncratic neoclassical style; fine, Ingre-esque portraits inspired by photography; and biomorphic Surrealist works influenced as much by Ovid’s Metamorphoses as by Sigmund Freud. Though his work always remained recognizably his own, Picasso’s virtuosity allowed him to effortlessly move between styles, reimagining them in the process.

Picasso dedicated much of his effort in the early 1930s to sculpture and printmaking and curated his first career retrospective, an exhibition of 236 works presented at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthalle Zürich in 1932. In 1935, he stopped painting and sculpting for nearly a year to dedicate his time to writing poetry. As the Spanish Civil War intensified, the Republican government named him director of the Museo del Prado in Madrid (albeit in absentia) and commissioned him to create a mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. He took as his subject the recent destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi and Italian forces at the behest of the rival Spanish Nationalists, creating one of the most iconic anti-war statements in history. Though Guernica made him a political target for the fascists, he remained in Paris for the duration of the Second World War, surviving the Nazi occupation.

After the war, Picasso moved to the south of France, where he would reside for the rest of his life, and classical, Mediterranean themes returned to his work. He was offered a municipal museum in Antibes to use as his studio and gifted the works created there to the town, inaugurating the first museum dedicated to his work (Musée Picasso, Antibes). He engaged with the ancient pottery traditions of the town of Vallauris to create ceramics, and revived his sculptural practice, making assemblages from roadside refuse and innovative silhouettes of folded sheet-metal. He also created paintings, drawings, and prints, often in series, challenging the history of painting by confronting his heroes, the great masters of the past: Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco Goya, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas.

Picasso was widely exhibited during his lifetime and continues to be so posthumously. He died in Mougins, France, in 1973, leaving no will. He was married twice: first to Olga Khokhlova in 1917, and then to Jacqueline Roque in 1961. In addition, he had partners who served as important muses to his oeuvre: Fernande Olivier (1904–12), Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–c. 1940), Dora Maar (1936–c. 1945), and Françoise Gilot (1943–53). He had five children: Paul (with Khokhlova), Maya (with Walter), Claude (with Gilot), Paloma (with Gilot), and a stepdaughter, Cathy (Roque’s daughter from a previous marriage). The settlement of Picasso’s estate in 1979 allowed for the establishment of the Musée National Picasso in Paris, and today his work can be found in most major collections around the world.