La Chèvre-Feuille is one of the most significant and historically charged publications to emerge from Pablo Picasso's wartime years in Paris. Created in 1943 during the German Occupation - a period in which Picasso remained defiantly in the city, continuing to work at his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins while the Nazis occupied the streets below - the suite represents both a profound act of artistic solidarity and a document of Surrealism's quiet resistance.

The work takes the form of an illustrated livre d'artiste, published by Robert-J. Godet in Paris, with poetry by Georges Hugnet - a central figure of the Surrealist movement, close friend of Picasso, and during the Occupation an active member of the French Resistance who helped forge false papers to protect those hunted by the Gestapo. The collaboration between Picasso and Hugnet was therefore not merely aesthetic but deeply political: two members of the Paris avant-garde maintaining the continuity of free culture under conditions of extreme suppression.

Picasso's contribution comprises six zincographs - prints executed from zinc plates, a medium he employed with particular fluency - etched in a manner designed for typographic integration with Hugnet's text. The images are characteristically Picassian in their Surrealist distortion: figures dissolve and reform, faces multiply their perspectives, and the female form is rendered simultaneously tender and fractured, intimate and unknowable. The draughtsmanship is of the highest order - confident, restless, and entirely without concession to the difficulty of circumstance.

The publication was produced in a total edition of 534 copies: 25 numbered copies on Arches paper with a supplementary etching and colour suite, 500 numbered copies on Lafuma paper, and six copies numbered I-VI on Arches with supplementary suite, printed by Lacourière and E. Durand, Paris. This example is from the edition of 500 on Lafuma wove paper - the standard issue, complete as published, with title page, text in French, justification page, and original Van Gelder laid paper covers with green and black lettering.

The complete suite was printed by the master printer Roger Lacourière (1892-1966) - the same atelier responsible for some of Picasso's most celebrated intaglio work of the period, and a printer of legendary reputation in the history of twentieth-century graphic art. The publication was also exhibited at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in Artists Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books (2001-2002), and at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Picasso as Book Illustrator (2006). 

The publication is catalogued as Cramer Books 38; Bloch 361-361e; Baer 683-8. It is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among other institutions.

La Chèvre-Feuille stands as a rare intersection of biographical urgency, Surrealist poetry, and graphic mastery - produced in one of the most extraordinary and perilous moments in the history of modern art.