Printer: Mourlot (1 of 1,000 Editions)

Dimensions: 74 x 50 cm

Condition: Very good

Frame: In a charcoal frame

Description: The Musée de Grenoble has a special place in the history of modern art. Long before many French museums embraced artists such as Picasso and Matisse, they were building one of the country’s most adventurous collections of contemporary painting under the direction of Pierre André Farcy, who recognised their importance decades before they became universally accepted.

This original exhibition poster was published for the museum’s Peintres d’aujourd’hui (Painters of Today) exhibition in 1959 and reproduces Picasso’s L’Enfant à la Colombe (Child with a Dove), painted in 1943. The bold black lines and simplified forms show the remarkable economy of Picasso’s drawing, where a few carefully judged marks create an image of great strength and feeling.

The exhibition celebrated artists who had transformed the course of twentieth-century art, and Grenoble was one of the first museums outside Paris to champion their work. That forward-thinking approach remains part of the museum’s identity today, making this poster an interesting record of one of France’s most important collections of modern art.

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.