The world’s favourite artist is also the most collected. Themarket for works by Picasso is highly liquid, buoyant and canbe extremely rewarding. His desire to push the boundaries ofprintmaking produced many of the worlds most historicallyimportant and technically accomplished works.

Picasso’s graphic oeuvre spans more than seven decades,from 1899 to 1972. His published prints total approximately2000 different images pulled from metal, stone, wood,linoleum and celluloid. His unpublished prints, perhaps 200more, have yet to be exactly counted.

Picasso’s prints demonstrate his intuitive and characteristicability to recognize and exploit the possibilities inherent inany medium in which he chose to work. Once he hadmastered the traditional methods of a print medium, likeetching on metal, Picasso usually experimented further,pursuing, for example, scarcely known intaglio techniquessuch as sugar-lift aquatint. The printed graphic work ofPicasso shows a clearly defined succession of periods inwhich certain techniques predominated.

Pablo Picasso. 1881 -1973

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 and love and elicits from each medium the very subtlest effects the medium allows. It is hardly surprising that five, ten or even thirty states were sometimes necessary before a masterpiece emerged from his hands.

We specialise in supplying only the finest works from Pablo Picasso’s graphic oeuvre; and offer the discerning investor works of the utmost rarity and investment potential.

Mourlot Studios was a commercial print shop founded in 1852by the Mourlot family and located in Paris, France. During the1920s, Fernand Mourlot converted one of the locations into astudio dedicated to printing fine art lithography.

One of the most important contributions of the Mourlot Studiowas to be the fine art poster, and Mourlot became the placewhere posters were prepared and produced as works of art intheir own right.

In 1945, Pablo Picasso chose the now world renowned Mourlotstudio for his return to the lithographic medium. Set up in acorner of the shop, the lithograph studio would become hishome for several months at a time.

Between 1945 and 1969, Picasso created over four hundredlithographs at Mourlot. This collaboration would break newground in the lithographic process and lend a new dimensionto Picasso's work.

A very brief list of great masters that created their works atMourlot includes:

Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Joan Miró,Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, Francis Bacon,Roy Lichtenstein, Jacques Villon, Henry Moore, Fernand Léger,Alberto Giacometti and many more.

Fernand Mourlot

Picasso and Mourlot

Rental available

Saltimbanque’s Family

AU$ 72,000

Saltimbanque’s Family.

Lithograph printed in black, 1954

Bloch 753; Mourlot 249, only state

Signed in ink and numbered in pencil.

An impression from the edition of 50.Image Size : 50 x 64cm (19.7 x 25.2in)

Sheet Size : 50 x 65.6cm (19.7 x 25.8in)

Inclusive of GST