Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Visite à l'atelier was executed by Picasso for Verve, the French art periodical founded by publisher Estafros Tériade in 1937. The magazine, a French quarterly review of arts and letters, was lavish in design and challenging in content, regularly featuring designs by well-known modern artists of the twentieth century. Thirty-eight issues were published in total between 1939 and 1960.
In September 1954, Tériade published a double issue of Verve dedicated to Picasso and illustrating one hundred and eighty drawings by the master, the present work included, which were drawn in Vallauris that winter between 28 November 1953 and 3 February 1954. The rich publication reproduced each work in the exact size and chronological order of the original drawings, so as to preserve the integrity of the suite. Tériade remarked that this collection of drawings was Picasso's "finest, boldest, [and] most poignantly human of all he has produced in the course of his long and brilliant career" (E. Tériade, ed., op. cit., n.p.).
At the time Picasso began this series in November 1953, Françoise Gilot had just deserted him, taking their two children with her and leaving him alone as an abandoned man. Deeply hurt, he shut himself away in his vacant villa in Vallauris and frantically produced the 180 drawings which represent “... the diary, not verbal but visual, of a detestable ‘season in hell,’ a crisis in his personal life which led him to question everything...” (ibid.).
These works address the central theme of the painter and his model, of a man and a woman, of the subject and the object, handled in a style which is burlesque, comic, grotesque, even caricatured. Some ironically incorporate subjects linked to the world of the circus, the monkey, the acrobat, the clown.