Pablo Picasso’s Football (1961) is a vibrant color lithograph that captures the artist’s boundless energy and his enduring fascination with movement, play, and the human figure in action. Created in the last decades of his career, this work demonstrates Picasso’s ability to distill a scene into its most essential forms while imbuing it with a vitality that feels both timeless and immediate.

The composition depicts the exuberance of a football match, yet rather than a literal representation, Picasso presents a dynamic interplay of simplified shapes and bold colors. Figures are reduced to rhythmic arcs, angular limbs, and powerful gestures that seem to spring from the page. Each player is less an individual portrait than a universal symbol of motion, force, and coordination. The field of play is suggested through spatial tension and color contrast, with the lithographic process allowing for both crisp definition and painterly softness.

Picasso’s palette is direct and expressive, utilizing strong primary tones that echo the vigor of the sport itself. Reds and blues pulse against areas of white, creating a sense of urgency and confrontation, while black contour lines tie the composition together with Picasso’s unmistakable draftsmanship. The eye is pulled in multiple directions at once, mimicking the fast-paced chaos of the game.

As with much of Picasso’s graphic work, Football demonstrates his extraordinary ability to translate the spontaneity of drawing into the permanence of print. Working closely with master lithographers, he pushed the medium to its limits, achieving a freshness that belies the technical complexity of the process. The resulting image conveys immediacy — as though the ball might come flying off the sheet at any moment — while also functioning as an abstract meditation on movement and human energy.

Created in 1961, during a period of reflection and renewed experimentation, Football reveals Picasso’s ongoing engagement with themes of play, rivalry, and communal experience. It is at once a celebration of sport and a testament to his enduring artistic vitality at eighty years old. With its bold design and spirited execution, this lithograph stands as a vivid reminder that Picasso never ceased to find inspiration in the dynamism of life itself.

This color lithograph on Arches paper is hand signed signed by Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 – Mougins, 1973) in pencil in the lower right; aside from the numbered edition of 200 in pencil in the lower left; published by Le Patriote, Nice.

Catalogue Raisonné & COA:
Pablo Picasso Football, 1961 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 sale of the work).

1. Bloch, Georges. Picasso Tome I Catalogue d’loeuvre grave et lithographié 1904-1967. Berne: Editions Kornfield et Cie, 1968. Listed and illustrated as catalog raisonné no. 1019.
2. Mourlot, Fernand. Picasso Lithographie IV: 1956-1963. Monte Carlo: André Sauret, 1964. Listed and illustrated as catalogue raisonné no. 356
3. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany our Pablo Picasso, Football, 1961.

About the Framing:
Framed to museum-grade, conservation standards, Pablo Picasso Football, 1961 is presented in a complementary moulding and finished with silk-wrapped mats and optical grade Plexiglas.