Pablo Picasso

Life and work

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga on 25 October 1881 and died at Mougins in the south of France on 8 April 1973. Trained by his father and at the academies of Barcelona and Madrid, he settled in Paris in 1904. The Blue and Rose periods gave way in 1907 to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and with Georges Braque he built Cubism over the years that followed. Neoclassicism, Surrealist distortion, the political statement of Guernica in 1937 and a long late output at Vallauris and Mougins came after. He was also, for some sixty years, among the most prolific printmakers in the history of the medium, and in his last decades a potter working with the Madoura workshop at Vallauris.

Disciplines and how they differ

Four markets carry this name and they barely overlap. The paintings and sculptures belong to a handful of salerooms and to museums. The Madoura ceramics, editioned in the hundreds, form a market of their own. The printed work runs from the great intaglio suites, the Saltimbanques of 1905, the Suite Vollard of the 1930s, through the Mourlot lithographs of the late 1940s and the Arnéra linocuts of the 1960s. And beneath all of it sits an enormous body of posters and reproductive lithographs issued after his designs and catalogued as after Picasso. LLB Auction has handled the printed end: two prints and one etching, all three sold.

What a specialist examines

The first question is always whether the sheet is an original print or a reproduction made after one. The catalogue numbers are the shorthand, Bloch for the graphic work as a whole, Baer for the intaglio, Mourlot for the lithographs, Czwiklitzer for the posters, and a saleroom that cannot cite one is telling you something. The second question is the signature and how it got onto the sheet. A pencil signature with an arabic number from a small edition is one thing, a stamped signature from an edition of a thousand another, a poster from an edition of fifteen thousand designed jointly with a lithographer another again. Paper is diagnostic: Montval laid with the Vollard watermark for the 1939 printing of the Suite Vollard, Arches for the Mourlot lithographs, ordinary wove for the posters. Then condition, which for the intaglios turns on the strength of the burr as much as on foxing, staining and mat burn.

Market position

The spread is the whole story. At Phillips in New York in October 2024 a signed drypoint from La Suite Vollard, Minotaure caressant une dormeuse, made USD 63,500. At Bonhams in London in July 2015 the lithograph Femme au Fauteuil No. 4 of 1949, signed and numbered from an edition of fifty and printed by Mourlot, made GBP 47,500. At the same house in Los Angeles in June 2025, La Danse des Faunes of 1957, a lithograph from an edition of a thousand carrying the artist's stamped rather than written signature, made USD 896. And a Côte d'Azur travel poster of 1962, from an edition of fifteen thousand, made GBP 1,280 at Bonhams in London in September 2024. One name, four orders of magnitude. Each figure includes the buyer's premium as the house prints it.

What a seller should have ready

The sheet photographed complete, including all four margins, and any watermark photographed against the light. The reverse in full. The signature in close detail, with a note of whether it is in pencil, in ink, printed within the image or stamped. The edition number exactly as written, and the total edition if it appears anywhere on the sheet. Sheet and image measurements in millimetres. Any publisher's or printer's credit line, which on the posters is usually set in the lower margin and is the quickest way to place the sheet. And the purchase paperwork, which for this name does more work than for almost any other.