Original Picasso lithograph, Les Deux Fleres”

From the 1906 original. #3837/5000. Measures 21x31” on thick artist stock. Printed by I.M.L Paris in 1980. This lithograph is now 43 years old. Between May and August 1906, Picasso stayed in Gósol, a small village in Upper Catalonia, accessible only by mule. A unique encounter then takes place between his work and the grandiose landscape of this ageless region, preserved from industrial modernity. The works produced during this stay are at the crossroads of two worlds and mark a transition without return. This delicate gouache is still imbued with the ocher melancholy of the great Circassian wanderings, of which the truncated motif of the drum remains here, a symbolic vestige of the acrobat era. From a stylistic point of view, it is also fully representative of the new classicizing style which is emerging in the painter's work. This emerging classicism is the fruit of multiple inspiration; that of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres first of all, whose “Turkish Bath” (1862, Louvre Museum, Paris) Picasso was able to admire at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, and which is reflected here in the linear outline of the slender silhouettes standing out against an almost plain background. Through the choice of subject, it is also a more distant inspiration, although just as significant, which manifests itself: the eternal Mediterranean, populated by young ephebes. Finally, the sculptural treatment of the bodies, the stylization of the torso and the legs whose volumes are obtained by a nuance of light colors, refer to the tradition of archaic Greek statuary of the kouroi . Check out my other listings for combined shipping!