Pablo Picasso

PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, 1973)
"Les banderillas", 1961
Lithograph, copy 9/50
Hand signed by Picasso in black pencil and hand numbered in the lower left corner.
Published in Georges Bloch's Catalogue Raisonné under number 1016 and in Mourlot's catalog under number 349.
This work was created in 1961 as part of the illustrated book "A Los Toros avec Picasso", with text by Jaime Sabartés, and was printed by the Atelier Fernand Mourlot in Paris.
Measurements: 24 x 30 cm (image); 50 x 56 cm (frame, approx.).

"Les banderillas" belongs to the illustrated book "A los toros avec Picasso", published in 1961 with text by Jaime Sabartés, one of the most significant editorial projects of the artist's late graphic production. In this series, Picasso revisits the universe of bullfighting -a recurring theme throughout his career- as a symbolic scenario where violence, ritual and spectacle intertwine.

With a language of extreme synthesis, the scene is reduced to essential signs: the figure of the bull, the gesture of the banderillero and the schematic presence of the audience emerge from a quick, almost calligraphic stroke that conveys immediacy and tension. Lithography allows Picasso to work with a wide range of grays and blacks, generating atmospheric effects that evoke dust, movement and depth with an extraordinary economy of means.

These compositions, apparently spontaneous in execution but with great structural control, reflect Picasso's mastery of the graphic medium and his ability to transform a traditional motif into a radically modern image.

Creator of Cubism together with Braque, Picasso was a turning point in the history of art. He began his studies in 1895, at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and only two years later he had his first individual exhibition, at the café "Els Quatre Gats". After several short stays in Paris, Picasso settled definitively in the French capital in 1904. The definitive international recognition will come in 1939, as a result of the retrospective that the MOMA in New York dedicates to him. During the following decades, anthological exhibitions will be dedicated to him all over the world, in Rome, Milan, Paris, Cologne and New York, among many other cities. He is represented in the most important museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London or the Reina Sofia in Madrid.