Pablo Picasso’s Après la Pique (After the Lance), 1959, is a commanding lithograph that reflects both the artist’s lifelong passion for bullfighting and his unmatched ability to translate raw energy into line and form. By the late 1950s, Picasso had already produced an extraordinary body of work devoted to the spectacle of the bullring, a theme he returned to repeatedly as a metaphor for courage, violence, ritual, and the eternal struggle between life and death. In Après la Pique, these themes coalesce in a composition that is at once brutal and poetic, stark yet deeply expressive.

The scene captures the critical moment after the picador has driven the lance into the bull’s neck, weakening the animal for the matador’s final act. Picasso distills this dramatic instant into a choreography of black and white forms, rendered with sweeping strokes and bold contrasts. The bull, massive and defiant, dominates the image, its body brimming with both power and vulnerability. Opposite, the mounted picador and his horse emerge in jagged, angular outlines, embodying the harsh inevitability of the ritual.

What gives the lithograph its remarkable force is not simply what is depicted, but how it is rendered. Picasso employs a vocabulary of gestural marks — heavy, almost violent lines counterbalanced by passages of delicate shading — that conveys both immediacy and timelessness. The image feels less like a static representation than a surge of motion arrested at its peak, as though the bullring itself has been transformed into a stage of myth.

Thematically, Après la Pique reveals Picasso’s profound identification with the bull, which he often cast as a symbol of virility, resistance, and tragedy. In this work, the bull is not a vanquished beast but a noble figure whose suffering and strength mirror the human condition. The starkness of the lithographic medium heightens the sense of confrontation — between man and animal, tradition and mortality, creation and destruction.

Created during a period of intense productivity in the late 1950s, when Picasso was deeply engaged with printmaking at the Mourlot Atelier in Paris, this lithograph demonstrates his genius for harnessing the full expressive potential of the medium. With economy of line and absolute clarity of vision, he imbues the bullfight — a subject as ancient as it is controversial — with enduring artistic resonance.

Après la Pique (After the Lance) stands as both an homage to the drama of the corrida and a reflection of Picasso’s broader artistic quest: to strip experience to its essentials, to confront the extremes of beauty and brutality, and to leave in his wake images that feel at once deeply personal and universally timeless.

Created in 1959, Pablo Picasso Après la Pique (After the Lance) is a color linocut on Arches paper hand-signed by Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, 1973) in pencil in the lower right margin. Numbered from the edition of 50 in pencil in the lower left margin, this work was published by Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris.

Catalogue Raisonné & COA:
Pablo Picasso Après la Pique (After the Lance), 1959 is fully documented and referenced in the below catalogue raisonnés and texts (copies will be enclosed as added documentation with the invoices that will accompany the final sale of the work):

1. Baer, Bridgette. Picasso Peintre-Graveur, Tome V – Catalogue Raisonné de l’œuvre grave et des monotypes, Berne: Editions Kornfeld, 1989. Listed and illustrated as catalogue raisonné no. 1230.
2. Bloch, Georges. Picasso Catalogue de l'ouvre gravé et lithographié, Volume I. Kornfeld et Cie: Switzerland, 1968. Listed and illustrated as catalogue raisonné no. 910.
3. McVinney, L. Donald, et al Picasso Linoleum Cuts: The Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kramer Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Random House, 1985. Listed and illustrated as catalogue raisonné no. 17.
4. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany this work.

About the Framing:
Framed to museum-grade, conservation standards, Pablo Picasso Après la Pique (After the Lance), 1959 is presented in a complementary moulding and finished with silk-wrapped mats and optical grade Plexiglas.