Provenance:

Acquired from a Swedish collector in the late 1980s
Private Collection, Sweden


“I stand for life against death; I stand for peace against war.”

Doves had great emotional significance for Picasso. They appeared as motifs in some of his earliest preserved drawings from his childhood, and also played such a prominent role in the art of his father Don José Ruiz Blasco that he was nicknamed ‘The Pigeon Lover’. The Spanish Civil War had a decisive effect on Picasso’s perspective. His art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler stated that Picasso had previously been ‘the most apolitical person’ he had ever known: “He had never thought about politics, but the Franco uprising in 1936 was an event that completely upset him and turned him into an advocate of peace and freedom.” After Picasso painted his famous response to the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, he became a symbol of the fight against fascism among artists and intellectuals. Picasso drew his most famous dove in January 1949, which was also used in the same year as the motif for one of his best-known posters, the announcement of the World Peace Congress in Paris. In his work, Pablo Picasso reacted to the threats of the time, to death and destruction, in a way of his own.