Sale 2532 - 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings, March 5, 2020

326  PABLO PICASSO Dans l’Atelier . Aquatint and burin, 1963. 235x335 mm; 9 1 / 2 x13 1 / 2 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 30/50 in pencil, lower margin. A very good, well- inked impression. Picasso had a lifelong fascination with the motif of the painter and model in the studio. While works of this theme appear throughout his early and mid- career (see lots 292, 298, 299 and 310), during the last two decades of his life it became among the most frequently recurring motifs in his work. These works take a variety of forms, but in general depict a painter, armed with a palette and brushes, facing a canvas, usually seen from the side, and a nude model (or models in the case of the present work), either sitting or reclin­ ing. Sometimes the painter is shown alone with the canvas but without the model, while at times the model is shown abstracted. There is a retrospective quality to Picasso’s prolific output of these painter, model and studio-themed works at the culmination of his career, in which he has carefully surveyed the many pre­ vious years of his life as an artist and taken the opportunity to examine the meaning of artistic creation—his life- blood for the past seven decades— through the relationship between the three principal participants: the artist, the model and the canvas. Bloch 1138; Baer 1135. [6,000/9,000]