Printer: Mourlot (1 of 2,000 Editions)

Dimensions: 76 x 55 cm

Condition: Very good 

Frame: Unframed

Description: This lithographic poster was created for the exhibition Jean Cocteau et son temps, organised by Julien Cain, former director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris in 1965, two years after Cocteau’s death.
Picasso agreed to contribute a portrait of his friend drawn in 1916, when Cocteau was serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War. The image was then prepared as a lithograph at the Mourlot studio, with the reproduction carried out by master printer Henri Deschamps.

What sets this example apart is its avant la lettre state — printed before the addition of exhibition text. Without typography, the image returns to something closer to the original drawing.

Ed. 2,000. Ref. Czwiklitzer # 257. 

Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, his extraordinary artistic genius made him the ‘rock star’ of the Modern Art world pioneering cubism, surrealism, expressionism and collage. Throughout his long career, he produced more than 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theatre sets, and costumes. From the mid-1940s, he also worked with the Mourlot studios in Paris and created over 400 lithographs and exhibition posters. As well as Fernand Mourlot, Henri Deschamps was Picasso's favourite and most trusted master printer at the studio and they collaborated together from 1945 right up until Picasso’s death in 1973.