Pablo Ruiz Picasso

PABLO RUIZ PICASSO (Malaga, 1881-Mougins, 1973).
"Musketeer and Odalisque-Medusa", from the series "Suite 156".
Etching, copy 42/50.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 27.5 x 35 cm (print); 51 x 59 cm (frame).

Suite 156 consists of a set of one hundred and fifty-six prints from as many copperplates that Picasso engraved when he was over ninety years old. The works show his old age through an iconography that never ceases to show an elderly Picasso. The prints do not have an overall view, but they all have in common a retrospective look at the artist's life and work, and a nod to his visual memory. Thus, we can glimpse the theme of the circus, to which Picasso was assiduous in his youth; the female nude, with images of brothels, or his debt to painters for whom he felt admiration.

The creation of Suite 156 was structured in three moments. From January to May 25, 1970, Picasso engraved more than fifty copper plates. In the second stage, between February 25 and June 16 of the following year, he made nearly a hundred plates, including thirty-eight dedicated to the image of Degas. Finally, in March 1972, he produced three more copperplates, two of them for Suite 156. Fifty numbered copies of this series, printed in its entirety by the brothers Piero and Aldo Crommelynck, were printed. The only three complete series that exist of Suite 156 are in the Picasso Museum in Paris, in a private collection and in the Bancaixa Foundation.

Creator of Cubism together with Braque, Picasso's painting was a turning point in the history of art. He began his studies in 1895, at the Provincial School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and only two years later he had his first individual exhibition, at the café "Els Quatre Gats". After several short stays in Paris, Picasso settled permanently in the French capital in 1904. After his blue and pink periods, developed in the early years of the century, the painter began his geometrical experiments in 1906, during a stay in Lérida. A year later he began to paint "Las señoritas de la calle Avinyó", and in 1909 he came into contact with Braque and began his cubist period. During the second decade he developed his classical period, and created his famous sets for Diaghilev's Russian ballets. In 1936 he was appointed director of the Prado Museum by the Government of the Spanish Republic, and a year later he painted "Guernica". The definitive international recognition will come in 1939, as a result of the retrospective dedicated to him by the MOMA in New York. During the following decades, anthological exhibitions will be dedicated to him all over the world, in Rome, Milan, Paris, Cologne and New York, among many other cities. He is represented in the most important museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London or the Reina Sofia in Madrid.