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Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
PABLO PICASSO Figures.
Etching, 1927. 194x277 mm; 7 5/8x11 inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 50. Printed by Frélaut, Paris. Published by Louise Leiris, Paris. A very good impression of this scarce, early etching.
Picasso's (1881-1973) ascent to becoming one the most influential and important international artists of the 20th century included establishing a new form of modern painting through his Blue and Rose periods of the early 1900s and developing Cubism during the 1910s. He also flirted with Surrealism in the 1920s, after a brief focus on Neoclassicism following the upheaval of World War I.
In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as "one of ours" in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste. Notwithstanding, Picasso still exhibited Cubist works at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925. Surrealism did however, during the 1920s, provide Picasso with the means to develop new imagery which he combined with Cubism and the primitivism of his work in 1907-10, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, oil on canvas (now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York). This surrealist influenced imagery of the 1920s is evident in the current etching, Figures, 1927. Surrealism reignited Picasso's attraction to primitivism and eroticism.
During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in Picasso's work. His adoption of the minotaur figure came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it in their own work. The minotaur also appears, iconically, in Picasso's Guernica, 1937 (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid), and also, along with representations of his then mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, are frequently featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings from the 1930s. Bloch 81; Geiser 122.
