On the morning of April 8th, 1973, the art world lost one of its greatest influences and contributors.

Pablo Picasso had a long career during which he personally shaped the landscape of Modern and Contemporary art practice. His abstraction of form, warping of faces, and distortion of space was a tradition previously relegated to inexperienced children, but in his hands became a way for the artist and their audience both to take on a new approach to viewing people and art. His personal movement away from realistic representation and into Cubism preceded the shift that would later come for the art world as a whole, taking many artists towards broader ways of creating art.

Fifty years later, the art world now has a chance to look back and reflect on the impact this artist had. It is undeniable that Picasso’s legacy continues to shape how artists view their own work today. The New York Times recently asked contemporary artists to look at his influence in their practice, which they reflected on with extreme fondness. Faith Ringgold calls him her hero, George Condo says he freed him from the belief that you should never show your influences in your work, and Nicola Tyson spoke about how it is unavoidable to be uninfluenced by him. Many artists have gone so far as to create direct Homages to Picasso. Everywhere you look in the current art landscape, Picasso is there.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

(Pablo Picasso)

Beginning in April 2023, museums and galleries around the world have gathered to create the Picasso Celebration, a program of nearly 50 shows, exhibitions, and events dedicated to honoring the legacy of Pablo Picasso. The French and Spanish governments, the two countries that were the most prominent in Picasso’s career, joined together to create a commission around this occasion and encouraged institutions to use this 50th anniversary of his passing to reexamine and take stock of the artist’s work. Exhibitions will be shown at institutions like the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Musée Picasso in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

As part of the celebration, RoGallery is honored to present the Picasso Estate lithograph collection, which has not been publicly exhibited since its publication in the early 1980s. The collection contains over 200 lithographs printed on French Arches paper, authenticated by Marina Picasso and published in partnership with Jackie Fine Arts. These limited edition prints are of some of Picasso’s most famous masterpieces, reproduced in painstaking detail from the original paintings and drawings. The prints are hand-signed, numbered by Marina Picasso in pencil, and authenticated with the ink-stamp and embossed Estate seal.