The Human Comedy presents new works by Annabel Tempest shown in dialogue with a selection of Pablo Picasso’s lithographs, La Comédie Humaine. Through works on paper, ceramics, and large-scale compositions, Tempest reimagines the “human comedy” through the seasons as an unfolding cycle of narrative and gesture
Picasso’s lithographs, made for the art journal Verve in 1954, explored the archetypal roles of the artist, the lover and the dreamer. Tempest’s response relocates these figures into the lived terrain of Somerset, where art, craft, and community intersect. Her works unfold through the four seasons, tracing patterns of continuity between natural and creative cycles.
The two large-scale pieces expand her intimate linework, creating an immersive encounter with the rhythms of drawing itself. Alongside these, a group of hand-painted ceramics translates her mark-making onto clay, aligning with Picasso’s graphic ceramic practice.
For Picasso, La Comédie Humaine became a stage upon which to rehearse the artist’s identity: the heroic maker as actor, observer, and myth. Tempest inverts this logic. Her Human Comedy resists the singular voice, instead mapping an art of locality which is sustained by the social and cultural fabric of Somerset and by the gestures of community, rather than the assertion of self.
Selection from La Comédie Humaine, Pablo Picasso, Lithographs, 1954. White Chapel Somerset Collection.
In 1954, the publisher Tériade invited Pablo Picasso to create a series of lithographs inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s monumental literary cycle La Comédie Humaine. Produced with the master printers of Atelier Mourlot in Paris, the resulting twelve works translate Balzac’s study of society into Picasso’s playful idiom such as figures of the artist, the dreamer, and the lover reimagined through bold line.
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Originally conceived for Verve magazine, the series reflects Picasso’s enduring dialogue with Balzac’s world of performance and desire. The lithographs retain a sense of immediacy and improvisation, their technical precision giving way to gesture and spontaneity.
Annabel Tempest is an artist and illustrator work explores storytelling through line, texture, and pattern, translating the everyday and the folkloric into vivid visual worlds.
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Rooted in Somerset, Tempest draws inspiration from local culture and landscape, where making is understood as both communal and celebratory. Her background in surface pattern design informs a language of layered mark-making that is tactile, rhythmic, and alive to the pleasures of material process.
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Alongside her independent practice, Tempest has illustrated for publishers and brands including Simon & Schuster, BabLit–Gibbs Smith, Clarks Shoes, and UK Greetings. She lives and works in Somerset with her family, finding continual inspiration in the region’s seasonal rhythms and creative community.