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La petite Corrida 400€
Picasso does not take up lithography again until the end of
November 1957. And here we see again his game with Galerie Louise. On
Saturday, November 23, he makes a beautiful bullfighting lithograph for
XXe Siècle magazine, an art magazine founded in 1934 and directed until his
death in 1974 by publisher Gualtieri di San Lazzaro. This historical number
X of the second period of the magazine, entitled L'écriture plastique,
includes lithographs by Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Serge Poliakoff and
Zao Wou-ki, an engraving by Raoul Ubac, a zincography by Henri Michaux,
and pochoirs by Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Victor
Vasarely. The contribution of Picasso is a small lithograph of 20 by 29 cm
with one of the themes that has been reproduced most in posters, the
bullring. It is La petite Corrida (R. 713, M. 302) printed on vellum paper of
30.3 by 23.9 cm. It is made in four colors (yellow, blue, red and black) with
lithographic pencil on paper transferred to stone. But Picasso also authorizes
San Lazzaro to market an edition with margins of 50 numbered copies signed
on Arches paper of 42.5 by 29.5 cm, also printed by Mourlot. Nowadays, the
complete copies of the current issue of X number of the XXe Siècle
magazine are sold, printed at 2,000 copies, at more than 1,000 euros per unit.
Christie's sold a copy numbered 10/50 of the edition signed with large
margins at auction No. 5831 in London on June 2, 2005 (Lot 137) for 3,840
Pounds or $ 6,962. But there is still a way to procure a proof of this beautiful
lithograph of a bullfighting ring, since, although the reasoned catalogs do not
indicate it, Mourlot printed it again for San Lazzaro in 1971, to be included in his special issue Hommage à Picasso,
from which an English and a German edition were also printed in 1976. To compensate Louise Leiris, Picasso does
the following day, that is, on Sunday, November 24, 1957, a new version of the small bullfight to be marketed by
the usual channel. This is better than the previous one, insofar as XXe Siècle had to adapt to the reduced vertical
format of the magazine, while for the gallery he opted for the landscape format that best fits a bullring. He used
seven lithographic papers of 46.5 by 61 cm passed to seven stones, one for each color: yellow, light blue, green,
dark blue, vermilion red, purple and black. The gallery published it in 1958 to 50 numbered and signed copies
(Corrida, R. 714, M. 303). The two lithographs are made with the same theme, facture and colors as four drawings
he had made on August 1 of that year on a notebook and were reproduced in 1961 in the book Toros y Toreros
(Cramer 112). And Picasso still performs a few days after the first two other magnificent versions of the bullring,
also in large size (36.5 by 54 cm). But this time it is not published as an original lithograph, but as one of
interpretation made by Henri Deschamps from a Picasso drawing made on December 5, 1957. It is the splendind
lithograph contained, folded in two, at the end of the book Le Carmen des Carmen
