There Vollard Suite it is considered the most important work in the history of twentieth-century engraving. It has rarely been exhibited complete and will be for the first time in Italy at the MAN museum, thanks to the loan granted by the prestigious museum of modern and contemporary art MNCARS, Centro de Arte Reina SofÃa Museum in Madrid , one of the most important European and international museums.
Made up of 100 engravings made by Picasso between 1930 and 1937, the Vollard Suite includes 27 recordings with different themes and 73 with five specific themes: The battle of love, The taller of the sculptor , Rembrandt , El Minotauro and The Blind Minotaur and 3 portraits of Ambrosias Vollard , in which Picasso recreates the complex personality of the merchant. At first glance, the variety of iconography might suggest a certain incoherence, but considered as a whole, the engravings show a great conceptual and formal unity.
The most intense work is that of the series The taller of the sculptor fruit of one of those frenetic creative moments that characterized Picasso’s life. In fact, although the artist worked for almost seven years on Suite , 40 of those 46 recordings were made in just 3 months, between March and May 1933. The world of creation, the atmosphere and tension between the model and the work of The taller of the sculptor it is interesting above all for the fact that those engravings are the direct consequence of the sculptural work created by Picasso between the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. The sculptures produced in that period sparked heated controversy. Some critics and artists believed they saw in the recovery of the classical world a kind of betrayal of the artistic avant-garde that Picasso had embodied since the beginning of the century. Picasso had come into contact with classical and ancient art a year earlier, in Italy, during his travels to Florence, Naples and Pompeii. The work begun in the sculptures continues in much of the Vollard Suite, and precisely the engravings of The taller of the sculptor gave rise to the question, malicious according to Breton, that specialists asked regarding Picasso’s renunciation and his “return to order”, surprised by the apparent subversion of old values ​​carried out by the Malagueño artist.
The tension, the melancholy, the eroticism, the search for form that can be observed in the hundred engravings of Vollard Suite , are in close relation with Picasso’s life in those years. Picasso had turned 50 in 1931, divorced from Olga Koklova, had a relationship with Marie Thérèse Walter and at the same time began his new and conflictual relationship with Dora Maar. It is also the period of the Spanish Civil War which profoundly shook the artist. In some of the engravings that are part of the Vollard Suite , very clear antecedents of what is considered Picasso’s masterpiece can be found: Guernica .
There Suite it can be considered as the highest point of the relationship between Picasso and Ambroise Vollard, the historic gallery owner and publisher who in 1901 created his first exhibition, sensing his genius. In this work Picasso uses all the techniques of engraving: drypoint, burin, etching and aquatint, offering extraordinary and masterful examples of artistic invention and incomparable technical versatility.
