Pablo Picasso
Blue, Rose, Cubism, neoclassicism, Guernica, and fifty thousand works.
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881, the son of a drawing teacher, and produced across seventy-five years an output estimated at fifty thousand works in every medium there is. The Blue and Rose periods, the invention of Cubism with Braque, the neoclassical 1920s, Surrealist distortion, Guernica in 1937, the late ceramics at Vallauris and the ferocious paintings of his final years each amount to a career on their own. He stayed in Paris throughout the German occupation, was a member of the French Communist Party from 1944, and died at Mougins in 1973.
The volume is what makes this market technical. Ceramics from the Madoura pottery were produced in editions from twenty-five to five hundred and are catalogued by Ramie; they are genuine works and are frequently misunderstood at both ends of the scale. The prints, catalogued by Bloch and by Baer, include the Vollard Suite and the Sueno y Mentira, and lifetime versus posthumous printing is decisive. Drawings are heavily forged. The Picasso Administration in Paris controls authentication and reproduction rights, and its opinion is the one that matters.
If you own a work by Pablo Picasso
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.