PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973).
"Nu et sculptures", "Suite Vollard", 1933.
Etching.
Signed in pencil.
37`8 x 29´7 cm (print); 44´5 x 33´6 cm (paper)..
In common agreement with historians and specialists, The Vollard Suite is considered the supreme work of 20th century engraving. The Vollard Suite is the fruit of intensely creative moments in which Picasso, in the manner of a graphic diary, developed his obsessions on themes of love, desire and existential fears. The definitive edition of the series began to be printed in 1939, before Vollard's death in July of the same year. Once the print run was completed, the prints went, along with other unpublished series, to the French art dealer's warehouses. The Vollard Suite prints were shown for the first time in 1979 at the exhibition held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Villa in Paris, from where they became part of the holdings of the Musée Picasso in Paris. Throughout the Vollard Suite the main protagonist is Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso's great love of the 1930s. From 1932 onwards his interest in her as a model increased, she appears so frequently in his paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, in her various moods and forms, that she can be considered the great heroine of Picasso's fictional world. Caught between the anger of his wife Olga and his passion for Marie-Thérèse, Picasso came to consider it the worst moment of his life. In many prints from the 1930s, all the female characters are portraits of the young woman.
Marie-Thérèse was for Picasso the antithesis of death, the fullness of life, the ardour of youthful love, the woman-child and the embodiment of his pictorial ideal already proclaimed in the neoclassical female figures of the 1920s.
The Vollard Suite is a clear testimony to Picasso's skill as a draughtsman. The one hundred prints cover a wide variety of subjects in Picasso's universe. The series is a considerable part of Picasso's graphic production from 1930 to 1937, and many of the works not included in it have similar themes. Each of the prints becomes comprehensible when analysed in the context of the series as a whole: it is the themes and motifs that preoccupied Picasso that impart unity and coherence to the prints. The major themes are: the passion of love personified in the model, her relationship with artists past and present, and the extent to which creative activity can be considered divine. The two preferred incarnations of the artist are as a classical sculptor and as a Minotaur, opposing personalities that form a typological dichotomy comparable to Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian antithesis. In the prints, an Apollonian linear style is sometimes fused with dark, baroque strokes of Dionysian impetus.