After Pablo Picasso

After PABLO PICASSO (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973).
"Suite Vollard 1930/37".
Engraving, copy 282/300.
Third Edition III 1992.
Signed with stamp and dry stamp "Plitt" on the lower right. Edition of the German Museum Müllheim an der Ruhr.
Certificate issued by VG Bild-Kunst (Bonn) on the back.
Measurements: 45 x 32,5 cm.

In common agreement among historians and specialists, The Vollard Suite is considered the masterpiece of 20th century engraving. The result of one of Picasso's most intense creative periods, the series functions as an authentic graphic diary in which the artist explored his obsessions around love, desire and existential fears. The definitive edition began to be printed in 1939, a few months before Ambroise Vollard's death in July of the same year. Once the print run was completed, the prints, along with other unpublished series, remained in the warehouses of the famous French art dealer. The original Vollard Suite prints were exhibited for the first time in 1979, at an exhibition held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Villa in Paris. They subsequently became part of the permanent collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris.

The Vollard Suite is an exceptional testimony to Picasso's mastery as a draughtsman. Its one hundred prints cover a wide range of themes characteristic of the artist's creative universe. The series represents a fundamental part of Picasso's graphic production between 1930 and 1937, and many of the works not included in it share similar concerns and motifs. Each print acquires full meaning when analyzed within the series as a whole, since it is precisely Picasso's recurring themes and concerns that give unity and coherence to the work. Among the major thematic axes are the passion of love, embodied in the figure of the model; the artist's relationship with the creators of the past and present; and the reflection on the almost divine character of creative activity. The two most significant representations of the artist appear under the figures of the classical sculptor and the minotaur, opposing personalities that form a dichotomy comparable to the Apollonian-Dionysian opposition formulated by Nietzsche. In the prints, a linear and balanced style of Apollonian roots sometimes merges with dark, intense and baroque strokes, charged with a clearly Dionysian impetus.