Collection: Picasso Pablo

(Malaga 1881 - Mougins 1973)

Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, and lithographer, was one of the absolute protagonists of 20th-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 origin and French by adoption, the extravagance of his art was soon admired throughout Paris: together with Georges Braque, he sought the solution to the problem of the third dimension and created new expressive purposes, characterized by a revolutionary writing of the real. The fruitful friendship between the two gave rise to a new vision of space, with dismembered and faceted objects, created from the fragmentation of planes. Thus, Cubism was born, whose starting point was the necessity to oppose the mechanical reproduction of the real and the supposed superficiality of observation of previous currents, particularly Impressionism: the external world was not to be merely seen, it had to be understood.

Pablo Picasso as an engraver and lithographer

Picasso was, without a doubt, the artist who brought the art of printmaking to its highest stylistic levels, in a path parallel to that of painting and never subordinated to it. In his lifetime, he produced more than 2,500 prints, establishing himself as the most innovative and prolific engraver of his time. The collaboration with Mourlot – the printer who worked with the greatest artists of the century – gave rise to lithographs of extraordinary quality, in which the speed of the line and the compositional freedom reached unparalleled results. Alongside lithographs, Picasso mastered with equal skill etching, drypoint, and linocut, exploring each technique as a new language to be reinvented.

Exhibition catalog The “Carnet de la Californie” by Pablo Picasso. Fifty years after the master's death