Collection: Picasso Pablo

(Malaga 1881 - Mougins 1973)

Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor and lithographer, is one of the absolute protagonists of twentieth-century art. His name is linked to cubism and he also participated in surrealist exhibitions, but his artistic production goes beyond any definition.
Spanish by birth and French by adoption, the extravagance of his art is soon admired throughout Paris. Together with Georges Braque he searches for the solution to the problem of the third dimension and creates new expressive purposes, marked by a revolutionary writing of reality. The fruitful friendship between the two gives life to a new vision of space, with dismembered and faceted objects, created by the fragmentation of the planes. Thus was born Cubism, whose starting point is the need to oppose the mechanical reproduction of reality and the presumed superficiality of observation of previous currents, in particular Impressionism. The external world must not only be seen, it must be understood.
Picasso is, without a doubt, the artist who brought the art of printing to its highest stylistic levels in a path parallel to that of painting. He produced more than 2,500 prints in his life, establishing himself as the most innovative and prolific engraver of his time. Among the works present in the gallery, there are reinterpretations of the works of the great masters, such as the lithographs inspired by the art of Goya, Velàzquez, Pussin and Manet; prints themed on bulls and bullfighting, the former sacrificial victims and at the same time destructive powers, the latter a ceremony that leads back to the eternal conflict between life and death, a constant in his immense production; the series of the Comédie Humaine , a tribute to the work of Balzac, a sort of catalogue raisonné of "human types" and their passions. Also present are the lithographs of the Carnet de la Californie , a series of drawings made by the master in a few weeks, transposed into lithography by Mourlot. The notebook is composed of fifteen drawings of the interior of his studio, seven portraits of Jacqueline Roque as an odalisque and three quotations from old masters.

Browse the catalog of the exhibition The “Carnet de la Californie” by Pablo Picasso. Fifty years after the death of the master