East China's Zhejiang Province will host a two-week Picasso Original Lithographs Exhibition from Thursday to December 1 in the Zhejiang Exhibition Hall.

The exhibition symbolized the end of the Picasso Original Lithographs Exhibition Road Show in Asia, as part of the year-long cross-cultural campaign "the Year of France in China." The lithographs on display are all provided by Picasso Foundation, the only authority with most of original works of Pablo Picasso.

According to the organizing committee, a total of 256 lithographs represented different creative periods of Picasso's lithographs, including Story of the Nature, Flowing Sand, Carmen and Corrida, which featured vividly various items such as animals, characters, poetry and classical stories.

Shen Guoquan, an official for the News and Culture Department of the Zhejiang provincial government, said the exhibition is expected to allure huge numbers of people, many of them for the first time.

The lithographs were insured with an estimated 100-plus million yuan (about US$12.3 million), he added.

Picasso made prints throughout his long creative career, turning out etchings, wood cuts, lithographs and lino cuts, with their diversity and range bewildering, and he was, beyond any doubt, one of the greatest print masters of the 20th century.

(Xinhua News Agency November 18, 2005)