Pablo Picasso | Accord between the Warriors of Sparta and Athens

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) — Accord between the Warriors of Sparta and Athens

In 1934, the New York publisher The Limited Editions Club commissioned Picasso to illustrate a deluxe edition of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, the ancient Greek play in which the women of Athens and Sparta withhold sex from their husbands until the men agree to end the Peloponnesian War. Picasso produced six etchings for the book, printed by the Paris master printer Roger Lacourière, in a clean, classical line that nods directly to Greek vase painting and to the artist’s own neoclassical period of the 1920s.

Accord between the Warriors of Sparta and Athens depicts the play’s resolution: the long-warring soldiers, rendered in spare, continuous outline with none of the fracturing of Picasso’s cubist work, brought together in a gesture of truce. The etching is among the most admired of the Lysistrata suite, prized for the clarity and warmth of its line at a moment when Picasso was working in a deliberately restrained, classical register.

Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.

Etching on paper
21 × 26 cm (sheet); 41 × 47 cm (framed)
From Lysistrata by Aristophanes, 1934
Published by The Limited Editions Club, printed by Roger Lacourière