Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1966

Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Title: Harlequin, 1966
Medium: Color Offset Lithograph
Framed: Double Matted & Framed Under Glass
Image: 23 in x 17 in
Frame: 29 in x 35 in
Edition: Numbered XXXIV/LX (34/60) Inscribed in pencil in the lower left margin, aside from the numbered edition of 60, Printed: by S.A., Barcelona, 1966.
Signature: This work is hand-signed by Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 – Mougins, 1973) in pencil in the lower right margin.
Condition: This work is in excellent condition.
Authenticated: Harvey Clars Auction House in Oakland viewed and felt this was an original signature.
Sales Tax: Unlike eBay we DO NOT charge sales tax for out of California residents.

The Harlequin is one of the most emblematic paintings of the Museu Picasso, a painting that that shouldn’t be missing from any anthology of the permanent collection. Apart from its importance within the group of the most outstanding works of the museum, the painting is important for us because it was the first gift that Picasso donated to the Art Museums of Barcelona, the city where he was formed and became consolidated as an artist. The museum is now celebrating the centenary of that pioneering donation in 1919. Picasso had produced the painting two years before in Barcelona, during his stay between June and November 1917, on the occasion of the performance in the Teatre del Liceu of the ballet Parade with the company of the Russian ballet of Serguei Diàghilev. The painter had designed the costumes and the stage curtain of the show, and accompanied the company on their tour, already falling in love with the person who would become his first wife, the dancer Olga Khokhlova.

Precisely the young man with a melancholy pose in a suit of blue, green and salmon pink who was the model for The, Léonide Massine Harlequin, was the choreographer and lead dancer of the company of Diaghilev, Léonide Massine, who had become a good friend of Picasso in Rome. The sketches for the work and the major similarity with the face of the Muscovite dancer corroborate this, even though Josep Palau i Fabre assured that Picasso rejected the fact that the painting was a portrait of Massine

The greatest painter and most innovative sculptor of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso was also its foremost printmaker. His graphic oeuvre spans more than seven decades, from 1899 to 1972. His published prints total approximately 2000 different images pulled from metal, stone, wood, linoleum and celluloid. His unpublished prints, perhaps 200 more, have yet to be exactly counted.
Picasso’s prints demonstrate his intuitive and characteristic ability to recognize and exploit the possibilities inherent in any medium in which he chose to work. Once he had mastered the traditional methods of a print medium, like etching on metal, Picasso usually experimented further, pursuing, for example, scarcely known intaglio techniques such as sugar-lift aquatint.
The printed graphic work of Picasso shows a clearly defined succession of periods in which certain techniques predominated.

Between 1919 and 1930 he occasionally turned his hand to lithography. Then, in the etchings of the Vollard series, his creative powers reached a first culminating point. Most of the compositions that followed during the war years were intended for book illustrations.

The year 1945 marks the inception of his great lithographic work in the atelier of Fernand Mourlot. It seems almost as though he was now eager to make up for lost time. His growing mastery of the medium and his inventive genius soon enables him to venture into domains new to lithography and to achieve bold and striking effects.

After World War II, Picasso’s production as a print maker substantially increased and the etching and engraving continued to be his favorite medium for graphic expression. During several concentrated spans of time, however, he was profoundly involved with two other techniques: first lithography on stone, (and its surrogate, zinc) and subsequently, linocut, a relief method of carving and printing similar to woodcut but utilizing a linoleum instead of a wood surface. Picasso adapted the processes of both lithography and linocut to his own language and to his individual methods as a peintre-graveur. His continual inventiveness sometimes challenged his collaborators, the printers, to the limits of their own skills as craftsmen.

Picasso’s prolific and astonishing example in lithography during the late 1940’s and the 1950’s encouraged other principal painters of the Ecole des Paris, including Leger and Miro, to work directly on stone and zinc in association with printers. Two women, Francoise Gilot, a painter and writer Picasso met in 1943, and Jacqualine Roque, whom he met in 1953 (and who would become his second wife in 1961) were the primary sources of inspiration for his lithographic output. In 1951, when Picasso was seventy, he renewed his interest in the art of linocut, an interest which would continue for almost two decades.

In 1963 Piero and Aldo Crommelynck brought a hand press from Paris to Mougins, where the artist had settled permanently. From then on, his etching, drypoint and aquatint would translate into black and white on color compositions of unfailing inspiration.
In his eighties, Picasso actively resumed etching and engraving and about 500 intaglio plated from this period of his career have been published. Finally, in 1972, a year before his death, Picasso etched two intaglio plates, his last prints.

Picasso has astonished the ablest printmakers again and again. It is not only that he mastered the difficulties of new techniques with playful ease; he soon went on to obtain results that had hitherto been deemed impossible. A virtuoso craftsman in engraving, etching, lithography and linocut, he explored their secrets with patience, love, and elicits from each medium the very subtlest effects it is capable of yielding. Picasso cared. It is hardly surprising that five, ten or even thirty states were sometimes necessary before a masterpiece emerged from his hands.

WE DO NOT CHARGE SALES TAX FOR NON CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS.

This item is being offered by the Antique and Collectible Marketplace located in Sacramento, California, the largest independent antique store in Greater Sacramento with 6000 sq feet.

Related Items:

For additional information or to place an order for this item, please feel free to email us at AntiqueStore@gmail.com or call (916) 446-1122.

Vendor Contact Information:

Antique & Collectibles Marketplace
Contact: Ronald Curtis or Paulette Volz
501 NORTH 10th Street
Sacramento, California  95811 USA
Phone: (916) 446-1122     
AntiqueStore@gmail.com
https://tace.com/vendors/antiquestore.html.