Pablo Picasso - Vallauris Exposition - 1951 (1959)

Title: Pablo Picasso - Vallauris Exposition - 1951

Artist: Pablo Picasso

Year of printing: 1959

Publisher / Printer: Mourlot

Origin: France

Technique: Original chromolithography on paper

Size (inc. mat): 40 x 30 cm.

Size image: 22.5 x 17.2 m

Professionally matted in acid-free museum quality mat-board.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973) was a towering titan of the 20th-century avant-garde. Born in Spain but spending the vast majority of his prolific creative life in France, his restless genius left an indelible mark across painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, and theatrical stage design, alongside excursions into poetry and playwriting. Celebrated as a primary architect of modern art, Picasso famously co-founded the Cubist movement, pioneered constructed sculpture, co-invented collage, and continuously upended traditional aesthetics through an unmatched variety of stylistic periods. His legendary masterpieces range from the radical, proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) to Guernica (1937), his monumental, harrowing indictment of the Spanish Civil War.

This particular lithograph was pulled by Mourlot Frères, the historic Paris workshop that famously redefined printmaking by elevating the commercial exhibition advertisement into a fine art medium. Beginning in the 1930s with highly collected art posters for major retrospectives of Delacroix, Daumier, and Manet at the French National Museums, Mourlot became the epicentre of a modern print revival.

Concurrently, the atelier rescued limited-edition artist lithography from obscurity. During the early decades of the 20th century, the medium had largely been cast aside by contemporary painters, despite having reached a spectacular creative peak in the 1880s through the work of masters like Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard—nearly a century after its initial invention by Aloys Senefelder.

The trajectory of modern printmaking shifted permanently when Fernand Mourlot (grandson of the founder) began inviting an entirely new generation of painters into the shop to work directly onto heavy lithographic limestone blocks. This hands-on, deeply collaborative dynamic between artist and master printer fundamentally transformed the medium.

A major milestone occurred in 1937 when the studio created two promotional posters—one by Bonnard and one by Henri Matisse—for the Maîtres de l'Art indépendant exhibition at the Petit Palais. The extraordinary tonal richness and fidelity of these prints immediately secured Mourlot’s reputation as Europe’s premier fine art lithographer. That same year initiated a historic partnership with the visionary publisher Tériade for his iconic art review, Verve. Following the Second World War, the studio became a regular laboratory for Matisse, Georges Braque, Bonnard, Georges Rouault, and Joan Miró, who all gathered there to pull vital graphic works.

In 1945, Picasso selected the Mourlot studio for his intensive return to the lithographic medium. Claiming a small corner of the bustling workshop, he essentially made the studio his home for months at a time, pushing the boundaries of what was technically possible on stone.

In 1959, a Monte Carlo publisher commissioned a definitive catalogue raisonné to preserve and document these historic exhibition posters. Although rendered in a more compact format, these miniature plates were printed directly by Mourlot using traditional lithography (complemented occasionally by fine offset detailing). Because of the rigorous production standards and the absolute involvement of the atelier, these small-format editions are highly prized by collectors and are universally catalogued as an authentic part of the artists' graphic oeuvres.