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Lot Essay
The present work forms part of the Suite Vollard, a series of 100 etchings created by Pablo Picasso between 1930 and 1937, a seminal period in his career. The images function almost as entries in a diary, illustrating a galaxy of motifs and preoccupations, including the artist’s desire for his young mistress and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, his fascination with the process of artistic creation and transformation, the battle of the sexes and the analogy of making art and making love.
The late 1920s were years of profound change for Picasso, with interwoven developments in both his artistic and personal life. Many of the themes that were to find form in the Suite can be traced back to these turbulent years. By then Picasso had left the poverty of his early life in Paris far behind. He lived a respectable, bourgeois existence with his wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova. While he enjoyed the material benefits of success, Picasso began to resent restrictions on his freedom and gradually his marriage deteriorated. It was dealt the coup de graçe by Picasso’s chance encounter with the seventeen year old Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927.
The forty-five year-old artist’s opening gambit on meeting the young woman has entered Picasso lore. Struck by her Grecian profile and sensuous physique, Picasso reportedly approached her saying: “Mademoiselle, you have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you. I feel we are going to do great things together...I am Picasso” (quoted in A Question of Identity, Michael Fitzgerald, in Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse, Acquavella Galeries, New York, 2008, pp. 11).
For much of the next decade her features and classical profile would dominate Picasso’s work, not least in the Suite Vollard, and she is ubiquitous in the largest coherent group in the series, known as the Sculptor’s Studio. These forty-six etchings, showing an artist and model working, relaxing or carousing in a studio, expand upon themes developed in two recent illustrated book projects; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which includes the tale of a sculptor who falls in love with his creation, and Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu, which relates the tale of the doomed painter Frenhofer and his struggles to capture reality in paint. Ideas surrounding transformation and metamorphosis, the contrast between the created work and reality, particularly the impossibility of making any work of art so perfect it could compete with life itself, were of profound interest to Picasso and play a significant role in the Suite.
The late 1920s were years of profound change for Picasso, with interwoven developments in both his artistic and personal life. Many of the themes that were to find form in the Suite can be traced back to these turbulent years. By then Picasso had left the poverty of his early life in Paris far behind. He lived a respectable, bourgeois existence with his wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova. While he enjoyed the material benefits of success, Picasso began to resent restrictions on his freedom and gradually his marriage deteriorated. It was dealt the coup de graçe by Picasso’s chance encounter with the seventeen year old Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927.
The forty-five year-old artist’s opening gambit on meeting the young woman has entered Picasso lore. Struck by her Grecian profile and sensuous physique, Picasso reportedly approached her saying: “Mademoiselle, you have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you. I feel we are going to do great things together...I am Picasso” (quoted in A Question of Identity, Michael Fitzgerald, in Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse, Acquavella Galeries, New York, 2008, pp. 11).
For much of the next decade her features and classical profile would dominate Picasso’s work, not least in the Suite Vollard, and she is ubiquitous in the largest coherent group in the series, known as the Sculptor’s Studio. These forty-six etchings, showing an artist and model working, relaxing or carousing in a studio, expand upon themes developed in two recent illustrated book projects; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which includes the tale of a sculptor who falls in love with his creation, and Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu, which relates the tale of the doomed painter Frenhofer and his struggles to capture reality in paint. Ideas surrounding transformation and metamorphosis, the contrast between the created work and reality, particularly the impossibility of making any work of art so perfect it could compete with life itself, were of profound interest to Picasso and play a significant role in the Suite.