Pablo Picasso

PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973).
"Prostitute with bracelet, with Degas with his hands behind his back", Mougins, 1971.
Etching, copy 13/50. Total edition of 65 copies.
Work catalogued in "Catalogue de l'oeuvre gravé et lithographé 1970-1972", Georges Bloch, suppléments Tome I + II, volume IV.
Signed in pencil and justified in pencil.
A copy of this print run is kept in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.
Measurements: 36 x 48,5 cm (plate); 66 x 80,5 cm (frame).

In "Prostitute with bracelet, with Degas with his hands behind his back" Picasso places Edgar Degas, whom he deeply admired, inside a brothel. Degas is depicted in an almost voyeuristic manner: with his hands behind his back, observing the scene with a mixture of bourgeois detachment and artistic curiosity. It is a direct reference to the series of monotypes of brothels that Degas produced in the 1870s.

Pablo Picasso, a leading figure of universal art and co-founder of Cubism along with Braque, was a creator of inexhaustible versatility. After training in academicism in Barcelona and bursting into the modernist environment of Els Quatre Gats, he settled in Paris, where his style evolved rapidly through the Blue and Pink stages. His revolutionary zeal led him to decompose the form and invent collage, dominating the European avant-garde before moving through the classicism of Ingres and the expressive distortion close to surrealism. His work, deeply linked to his biography and political context, reached its ethical and artistic zenith with Guernica, a response to the horror of the Spanish Civil War. Finally settled in the south of France, he maintained a personal, vibrant and free style until his death. Today, his legacy is the central axis of the world's most prestigious institutions, from the MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, consolidating him as the great transformer of the contemporary gaze.