Why Are Signed Picasso, Miró and Dalí Originals Hanging at Delhi’s CMYK Bookstore?

Walk into CMYK at Lodhi Colony’s Meharchand Market this season and you’ll find more than beautifully produced art books. An entire floor of the bookstore now holds original works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, three names you’d usually expect to find on the walls of the world’s great museums.

The exhibition, ‘Picasso • Miró • Dalí – Master Impressions, Original Lithographs and Etchings’, runs from September 23 to November 22, 2026. It brings together more than 60 graphic works that show a side of these artists many admirers never get to see up close: their printmaking.

Not Sketches, Not Copies

These works are neither reproductions of famous paintings nor preparatory sketches. Each piece was conceived specifically as a lithograph or etching, produced in a limited edition, and individually numbered and signed by the artist.

For all three masters, printmaking was a serious artistic practice in its own right, not a way to churn out copies. Lithography and etching gave them new ways to play with line, colour and texture, and each worked with these techniques throughout his career, often alongside some of the finest master printers and ateliers of the time.

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What makes the show rewarding is how differently each artist approached the printed image. Picasso’s works are all about his famously economical, fluid line, where a few strokes carry a whole face. Miró brings his playful vocabulary of signs, figures and biomorphic shapes. Dalí pairs meticulous draughtsmanship with rich colour and his unmistakable Surrealist imagination.

The standout is Picasso’s ‘Portrait de Femme II’ (1955), a striking portrait of Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s muse who later became his wife. It was printed in an edition of just 50, and another impression from that same edition sits in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That makes the work an especially interesting example of Picasso’s graphic output.

Why Inside a Bookstore?

It’s the obvious question, and CMYK has a good answer. The store has always been more than a place to buy books. In its early years, it became a hangout for Delhi’s young creatives, hosting screenings of ‘Helvetica’ and ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ and PechaKucha evenings on everything from the art of the book to the sari. It later travelled to Jaipur, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and Pondicherry before returning to Meharchand Market for what it calls a new chapter.

That chapter is all about collecting. The new store puts a much bigger focus on rare, limited and collector’s editions and has a dedicated space for them. Earlier this year, CMYK presented ‘The Art of the Book’ at the India Art Fair, a curation of artist-signed, numbered and historically significant editions. Bringing original works by Picasso, Miró and Dalí into the store is a natural next step for a space interested in the intersection of publishing, collecting and visual culture.

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“At CMYK, books remain at the heart of what we do, but our interests increasingly extend into the wider world of collecting that surrounds them,” stated Kapil and Priya Kapoor, Directors of Roli Books and CMYK Bookstore, in a news release. They described the exhibition as a way to introduce audiences and collectors in India to an important side of artists “whose work is universally familiar,” they added.

The art book and the artwork sit under one roof at CMYK Bookstore, allowing visitors to move from reading about these masters to standing in front of their work. Perhaps that is what makes the exhibition interesting: these works are being encountered not in the hushed setting of a conventional gallery, but in a bookstore that has long treated books as entry points into wider worlds of art and culture.