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Prints & Photographs Part I

Live Auction: 14 April 2026 • 12:00 PM EDT • New York

Irving Penn’s Small Trades series, photographed in Paris, London, and New York between 1950 and 1951, stands as one of the most enduring achievements in 20th‑century portraiture. Depicting tradespeople photographed full‑length against Penn’s famously spare studio backdrop, the series elevates everyday laborers with the same elegance and rigor he brought to his iconic fashion photography. Selections from the project were first published across the French, British, and American editions of Vogue in 1951. Now celebrating its 75th anniversary since first publication, Penn's Small Trades continues to resonate for its incisive study of character, class, and craft.

Penn drew inspiration from earlier traditions of occupational portraiture, particularly 19th‑ and early 20th‑century typological approaches such as August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, as well as from documentary precedents including the work of street photographers like Eugène Atget. Today, the series remains a landmark: a humanistic record of professions, many now vanished, and a testament to Penn’s lifelong pursuit of the expressive power of the studio portrait.

Offered as four individual lots, the present suite of progressive proofs of Les Pipeaux by Pablo Picasso offers a revealing glimpse into the artist’s expansive and continually evolving creative process. Experimentation was central to his printmaking practice, and Picasso regularly printed multiple states to articulate a single scene and finalize the composition. Considered in tandem, these works unfold as a narrative—possessing a discernible beginning, middle, and end—and providing the viewer with a map of the image’s development. Whereas the initial state is defined by thin, angular lines and an abundance of negative space, the final state is dense with detail. Its background is animated by tightly worked forms, and the figures assume a heightened solidity and presence, culminating in compositional resolution.

A marked shift in Picasso’s subject matter emerges during his Neoclassical period, as he increasingly engages with mythological imagery. In these works, the artist embraces a nascent Surrealist sensibility, rendering fantastical figures with heightened specificity. Executed in the aftermath of World War II, the prints reflect Picasso’s renewed fascination with the imaginary—a notable departure from the introspective melancholy that often characterized his earlier portraiture. Here, we encounter successive iterations of a female figure, likely his then-partner Françoise Gilot, envisioned as a maenad bearing a tambourine. Her presence anchors the mythological tableau in lived experience, generating a compelling paradox that dissolves the boundary between reality and fiction.