Pablo Picasso

PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973).
"Rembrandt holding hands with a veiled young woman" and "Sculptor with his model". From the "Suite Vollard", 1934.
Pair of etchings.
Proofs of cancellation of the plate.
Measurements: 27,5 x 20 cm (print); 42 x 31,5 cm (frame).

Exceptional lot composed of two cancellation proofs of the iconic Vollard Suite. Each print is marked by a cross that scratches the composition, a deliberate and definitive intervention known as "plate cancellation". This act, performed after the limited edition print run was completed, served as a guarantee that no further prints would be made. The few proofs obtained from these "closed" plates, such as the ones presented here, are priceless documents. They are the material epilogue of the creation, the physical testimony that certifies the end of the life of the matrix and assures the exclusivity of the original edition commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard.

In common agreement with historians and specialists, La Suite Vollard is considered the supreme work of 20th century engraving. The Vollard Suite is the result 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 Once the print run was completed, the prints passed, along with other unpublished series, to the French art dealer's warehouses.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 the interest in her as a model increased, she appears so frequently in his paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, in her different moods and forms, that we can consider her 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 of the 1930s, all the female characters are portraits of the young woman.

Marie-Thérèse for Picasso was the antithesis of death, the fullness of life, the ardor of youthful love, the woman-child and the embodiment of his pictorial ideal already proclaimed in the neoclassical female figures of the twenties.
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 analyzed 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, a linear Apollonian style is sometimes fused with dark, baroque strokes of Dionysian impetus.