09.12.2005 to 29.01.2006
Over 380 works of commercial graphic art by Pablo Picasso, produced between 1902 and 1972, have been acquired by the Swiss collector Bruno Margandant since 1949. This field of work established Picasso's popularity outside of the art world in front of a wider audience. The artist illustrated magazines and books, designed book covers and calendars, postcards and posters, and covers for programmes and musical notes. The early works were motivated by Picasso's pecuniary needs, but later designs were often executed as little favours for writer, musician or publisher friends, or spurred on by a conscious political commitment to the résistance, the French communist party or the international peace movement.
His popularity awoke the desire amoung publishers and editors to increase their titles' market-value through close association with the success-promising brand Picasso. Picasso not only showed a great interest in the technical realization of his designs, he also understood how to use posters, books and magazines as media for the dissemination of his intellectual, political and, above all, artistic ideas.
After St. Gallen, where Bruno Margadant lives, and the Picasso Museum Münster, the third venue of the exhibition is the Art Library (Kunstbibliothek) in Berlin. Here, around 180 exhibits representing significant sections of the Maragand private collection are complemented with individual works from the Art Library's own collection.
Organizer
