For the first session of the year 2020, the PIASA Editions Department is proud to present a selection of works by some of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Born in Malaga in 1881, Pablo Picasso is the son of José Ruiz y Blasco, a professor of painting. In Barcelona, he entered the School of Fine Arts and how to sign his first paintings. One of his paintings, The Last Moments, represents Spain at the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris.
He comes for the first time in the world capital of arts and settles in Montmartre. Around 1906-1907, alongside Georges Braque, he began a deconstruction of the perspectivist space inherited from the Renaissance. While working on the Demoiselles d'Avignon, the Spanish painter integrated African and Iberian masks. The plastic innovations of which he is one of the authors will constitute a considerable source of inspiration until today.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Pablo Picasso is approaching 70 years of age. With a density and diversity that is undoubtedly unequalled, his work already occupies the walls of the most emblematic museums and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. It is at the height of its glory. The atrocities that plunged the mid-twentieth century into mourning deeply mark the artist and constitute a turning point in the function he assigns to his work. It becomes a weapon.
Picasso's commitment to peace became central with the outbreak of the Spanish War in 1936. In reaction to the bombing of a Basque village, he presented "Guernica" in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Universal Exhibition.
This ambitious composition is a virulent denunciation of man's destructive impulse and heralds the worst. A few years later, it was the Korean War and more particularly the massacre of the No Gun Ri bridge that prompted the artist to produce "Massacre in Korea" in 1951. It is in this context that Picasso, a few months after his participation in the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw, made his first drawing of the dove.
This was chosen by Louis Aragon to serve as the poster for the Peace Congress that opened in Paris in April 1949.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Colombe - 1966
Color pastels drawing of a dove carrying a flower
Signed by the artist, dedicated to "Madame Simone" : "Pour Madame Simone son ami
Picasso" on the bottom, dated "Le 10.12.66" on the bottom right on the title page of
the volume "Le peintre et son modele"; Cercle d'art Ed., Paris, 1965
The drawing's mirror image transferred on the opposite page
(D) of the volume: 31 x 28,5
(D) of the drawing: 30 x 27,2 cm
A certificate by Mr. Claude Ruiz-Picasso will be delivered to the buyer.
Estimation: 10 000 / 15 000 euros
The dove drawn in this book was probably inspired by the white pigeons he kept in cages in his workshop. But the animal did not wait for the facetious virtuosity of the Andalusian master to become a symbol. An image of the Holy Spirit in medieval painting and then reborn, he is the one through whom hope arrives after the disastrous episode of the Flood. The bird adds to the already very important bestiary that populates Picasso's paintings.
