?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
PABLO PICASSO Corrida (Le Picador).
Lithograph, 1949. 562x760 mm; 22 1/4x30 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 21/50 in pencil, lower margin. A superb, dark and richly-inked impression of this large, important lithograph.
Picasso displayed an avid interest in bullfighting and the culture of the bullring throughout his prolific career, in a myriad of paintings, drawings and prints, including etchings from the early 1920s to lithographs and linoleum cuts from the 1950s/1960s (see also lots 412 and 422). In lithography, aside from numerous individual bullfight scenes produced over several decades, he particularly focused on the subject in three extraordinary series: the first in 1945 showing a standing bull in profile to the right, transformed over 11 separate lithographs from a realistic representation to an abstract, elemental bull's figure; the second in 1948 depicting different versions of an abstract bull's head seen close-up; and culminating in a group of scenes from 1949 showing a wide-angle view of the corrida and this tour-de-force semi-abstract lithograph of a picador stabbing a bull in the center of the ring. Picasso's friend and biographer Roland Penrose noted that, "The main involvement for Picasso was not so much with the parade and the skill of the participants but with the ancient ceremony of the precarious triumph of man over beast . . . The man, his obedient ally the horse, and the bull were all victims of an inextricable cycle of life and death," (Beauty and the Monster, London, 1973, page 170). Bloch 599; Mourlot 172; Reuße 485.
