Fleurs, made for a UCLA fundraising campaign, is the first work acquired by Aardt’s founder, who paid $25 for it in 1962 with some of his Bar Mitzvah money. This unsigned version was printed “outside” the signed and numbered edition of 100, but that would’ve cost $100 at the time, far breaking the budget. Needless to say, the price divergence has only expanded since then. More to the point, the work belongs to a specific category in Picasso’s late graphic production, where he engaged with the still-life tradition through the tactile directness of the medium. Flowers had in fact been a recurring motif since his Neo-classical period of the early 1920s, reappearing persistently in his graphic work as a subject that permitted the same formal investigation as the human figure, while carrying none of the psychological weight. This work is large enough to assert itself as a picture rather than a print, which is consistent with the institutional context the title implies. Atelier Mourlot, where Picasso worked from 1945 onward, produced hundreds of his lithographic editions, and the quality of their registration and stone-grinding is visible in the crispness of this work.
