Aug 1st –
Aug 30th, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 6-8pm
La Comédie Humaine is a volume of 164 heliogravures and 12 original color stone lithographs by Picasso. They are Picasso’s interpretation of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. Often said to be the writer’s greatest work, La Comédie Humaine addresses themes such as money, power, and social success during the Restoration period after the French Revolution. Picasso’s La Comédie Humaine examines his own personal crisis with aging and its effects on the Artist /Muse relationship.
These much studied, much collected color stone lithographs were printed under Picasso’s direction in 1954 at the famed Mourlot Studio in Paris. Color lithographs are a painstaking process, with each color requiring a separate stone.
In her book, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Karen L. Kleinfelder observes ‘The adoption of parody in both his style and his personal point of view marks La Comédie Humaine as the true beginning of Picasso’s late period where he starts to confront both his own myth and historical identity.”
