Picasso – Important Works on Paper
Saturday 7th June – Sunday 29th June
We are proud to present our stunning collection of Pablo Picasso prints, all originals from the time period. The collection includes signed and unsigned Picasso Exhibition posters from the 1960s to the late 70s.
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Who is Pablo Picasso?
Pablo Picasso (b.1881) was a Spanish painter who is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.
He was born Pablo Ruiz, the son of an art teacher and later adopted his mother’s maiden name of Picasso. He grew up in Barcelona, showing artistic talent at an early age. In the early 1900s, he moved between France and Spain before finally settling in Paris in 1904. There, he experimented with a number of styles and produced his own original ones, reflected in his ‘Blue’ and ‘Rose’ periods.
Galerie H. Matarasso, 1957
£1,350
“Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us.”
In 1907 Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a revolutionary work that introduced a major new style, ‘Cubism’, working closely with the French artist Georges Baraque in the development of this style. Picasso’s next major innovation, in 1912, was ‘Collage’, attaching pieces of cloth, newspapers or advertising to his paintings.
Picasso moved from style to style, experimenting with painting and sculpture and became involved with the Surrealist movement. In 1937, he produced his masterpiece, ‘Guernica’, a painting inspired by the destruction of the town in northern Spain by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso supported the Republican government fighting against General Franco, and never returned to Spain after Franco’s victory.
“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
Unlike many artists, Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation. From 1946 to his death, he lived mainly in the south of France. He continued to produce a huge variety of work including paintings, sculptures, etchings and ceramics as well as a vast array of posters and other works on paper.
L’Heritage De Delacroix, 1964
£1,350
Picasso was involved with a number of women during his life who were often artistic muses as well as lovers. He had four children. On 8th April 1973, he died of a heart attack at his home in Cannes.
“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse…but surely you will see the wildness.”
Style Timeline
Blue Period 1901-1904
This period is characterized by essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours. These sombre works, inspired by Spain but painted in Paris, are now some of his most popular works. The works seem to reflect his experience of relative poverty and instability, depicting beggars, circus people or the poor.
Sala Gaspar
£1,475
Rose Period 1904-1906
This period signifies the time when the style of Picasso’s painting regains its romantic quality in a series of cheerful and warm orange and pink colours, During these few years, Picasso was happy in his relationship with Fernande Oliver. Harlequins, circus performers and clowns appear frequently and will populate his paintings at various stages through the rest of his career.
Museo Picasso, Placio Agular
£475
Primitivism and Africa 1907-1909
Picasso looked further afield for inspiration at this time of his career, painting in a style strongly influenced by African and ancient Iberian sculpture. During this time the French empire was expanding into Africa, and African artifacts were being brought back to Paris museums. It was during this period that Picasso painted his most famous work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, echoing the angular shapes of the African masks and sculptures he saw in the Louvre
SIGNED
Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe – Galerie Louise Leris, 1962
£7,350
Cubism 1909-1912
From 1909 onwards Picasso moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality of the outside of the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, resulting in the artistic movement known as Cubism. Picasso analysed natural forms and reduced them into basic geometric parts on a two-dimensional plane. Colour was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre.
SIGNED
Galerie Louise Leris ,1960
£7,350
Classicism and Surrealism 1918-1945
Picasso’s Cubist periods was followed by his neo-classicism, a return to tradition. In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This return to order is evident in the works of many European artists in the 1920s.
Much of his work after 1927 is also fantastic and visionary in character. The Surrealism movement was growing in strength and popularity and even Picasso could not really avoid being influenced by it.
Galerie Lucie Weill, 1966
£1,350
Post 1945
Picasso’s late works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, he became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive and from 1968 through to 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an old man or the slapdash works of an artist past his prime. Only later, after his death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and as, as so often before, ahead of his time.
Galerie Lucie Weill, 1967-1968
£1,250
Sala Gaspar, 1968
£1,950
In the last years of his life painting had become an obsessions with Picasso, and he would date each picture with absolute precision, thus creating a vast amount of similar paintings – as if attempting to crystallize individual moments of time.
Come and see our historic Picasso Exhibition today!
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Castle Fine Art: Edinburgh 