£6,250
Contemporary & Post-War Art | Prints & Multiples | 653
Auction: Contemporary & Post-War Art | Prints & Multiples
Etching, ed. 250, on Montval laid paper with Picasso watermark, signed in pencil to margin
Provenance: Galerie de la Bouquinerie de l'Institut, Paris;
Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh.
Note: The Vollard Suite of one hundred etchings was a significant artistic undertaking. Commissioned by the art dealer Ambrose Vollard, Picasso worked on the series over a period of seven years, from the initial commission in 1930 until 1937, though it then took the printer a further two years to complete the full printing.
The suite reveals Picasso’s most significant personal preoccupations over this period of his life, as wider turmoil was unfolding across Europe. During this time Picasso embarked on an affair with the teenaged Marie-Thérèse Walter, and she became his mistress and his muse. Within the most coherent sequence of the suite, known as Sculptor’s Studio, Marie-Thérèse features in all 46 works. In this etching, she appears twice, as both artist’s model but also in sculptural form. Picasso casts himself in the leading man’s role of sculptor, inspired by his commitment at this time to classicism, which placed sculptor above painter in the hierarchy of arts. Marie-Thérèse views herself, while both versions of her, both real and created, are viewed by us in the position of the artist/sculptor, and through the hand of Picasso. In this way, the composition plays with ideas of perception, creation and reality, transformation and metamorphosis, the relationship between artist and muse and ultimately, between life and art.