Pablo Picasso Lithographs For Sale

Pablo Picasso had made lithographs since the 1920s but only gave the medium his full attention after the Second World War, when he began working with the printer Fernand Mourlot in Paris, who recalled him arriving “as though he were going to battle”, and over the following years he made hundreds of plates there. Lithography suited the way he worked because, unlike oil paint, each printed state recorded the point the image had reached, so that he could print a drawing, rework the plate and print again, and in The Bull he took a heavy, fierce animal through successive states down to a sparse outline, while the British Museum describes a pair of nudes that grew steadily more abstract as the plate was reworked, the figures becoming simplified until only the last state added birds and insects in the margins.

The medium also let him treat the plate almost like a sheet of paper to be cut, scraped and covered, since the Norton Simon Museum notes that a liquid wash could be scraped back to imitate wood engraving, a child’s drawing or graffiti, that inked paper cutouts could be printed on their own or combined with crayon drawing, and that a black figure on a white ground could be incised, covered and redrawn as a white figure on black. Transfer paper allowed him to draw away from the press and send finished work back to Mourlot, and the British Museum records him painting a wash onto transfer paper and working it with solvent so that it dried with an uneven texture, a result that ran against conventional printing practice, and the Norton Simon Museum records that he pressed his reluctant printers to follow him.

The themes that run through the lithographs here are the people closest to him and the subjects he kept coming back to, with portraits of Françoise Gilot from the late 1940s and of Jacqueline Roque from the later 1950s, a double portrait of the children Paloma and Claude made with fingerpainted ink on transfer paper, still lifes, a bullfight scene, and variations on earlier art in the manner of the David and Bathsheba series he made after Cranach, so that a process developed for commercial printing carries in several of them the mark of a hand.

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