Original Picasso Poster L'Atelier Mourlot, 1984

This is an original lithographic poster printed in 1984 for L'Atelier Mourlot — a landmark exhibition organised in Tokyo by the Seibu Department Stores to celebrate fifty years of fine art lithography at the Mourlot studio. The exhibition brought the full story of Mourlot's collaboration with the greatest artists of the 20th century to Japan, and Picasso — the artist who more than any other defined that story — was its natural centrepiece. This poster is both a tribute to one of the most consequential partnerships in modern art history, and a rare document of the moment that partnership was formally celebrated on the world stage.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) began working with Mourlot Frères in the late 1940s, arriving at the atelier on rue de Chabrol in Paris and taking over an entire floor to work directly on the lithographic stones. His relationship with master printer Henri Deschamps became one of the great creative collaborations of the century — a dialogue between an artist of inexhaustible invention and a craftsman of absolute fidelity. Over the following decades, Picasso produced forty-four original posters at Mourlot, each one catalogued by Czwiklitzer, each one a self-contained masterpiece of graphic art. He is said to have declared that lithography was the medium in which he felt most directly connected to the act of drawing.

The Mourlot atelier, founded in 1852 and led from the 1920s by Fernand Mourlot, became the most important fine art printing studio in the world — the place where Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Braque, Miró, Léger, Giacometti, Calder and Dubuffet all worked, drew on stone, and produced some of the defining printed images of the 20th century. An exhibition celebrating fifty years of that history, mounted in Tokyo by one of Japan's most prestigious retail institutions, was a global consecration of Mourlot's legacy.

This example is in excellent condition — grade A — and is presented unframed, ready for the wall it deserves.

A rare and layered piece — Picasso as the face of Mourlot's golden age, fifty years on, celebrated in Tokyo.