Imaging Backwards: Seven Decades of Picasso Master Prints

IMAGINING BACKWARDS seven decades of picasso master prints

IMAGINING BACKWARDS

IMAGINING BACKWARDS seven decades of picasso master prints

E S SAYS BY C HARLES ST UC KEY FOR E WO RD BY GARY T IN T EROW

This catalog is published in conjunction with the exhibition Imagining Backwards: Seven Decades of Picasso Master Prints, on view at McClain Gallery, Houston, September 13 – October 29, 2016.

Imagining Backwards: Seven Decades of Picasso Master Prints ISBN: 978-0-692-75600-3 Copyright © 2016 by McClain Gallery McClain Gallery 2242 Richmond Avenue Houston, TX 77098 mcclaingallery.com 713.520.9988 Design by John Kramer

INTRODUCTION Why are we perpetually fascinated with Picasso? Is it possible his creative genius forever changed the way we see the world? Or is it his mythic persona: a sensational and flamboyant bohemian artist, driven to dominate those around him, impassioned by the women he portrayed in his art? No other artist chronicled so personally, or prolifically, a life that takes us from the beginning of the 20th century through two world wars and into the space age. In Picasso we are reminded that destiny can bestow great genius and talent, but tempers it with flaws and disappointment. In examining the art and life of Picasso we discover a part of ourselves.

Through his printmaking Picasso provided a visual diary of his artistic legacy and the themes and people that were the mirror for his creative genius. It is fitting that the breadth of his print production reflects an equally endless font of inspiration and innovation. Picasso was voracious — in life and in art. This show presents a cross section of Picasso’s life’s work and highlights the richness of printmaking as a medium.

I am proud to have organized this exhibition. The contributions of others made this project truly special. I am privileged that the esteemed director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gary Tinterow, the foremost Picasso scholar of his generation, wrote the foreword for this catalog. To my dear friend Charles Stuckey, who contributed numerous essays throughout the catalogue, you are a true gentleman and scholar, thank you. Your insight into Picasso and the history of Western art has been a profound resource and inspiration — your guidance contributed enormously to shaping this show. I thank John Szoke whom I greatly respect as a dealer and who has dedicated much of his career to the work of Picasso. The support and assistance of my dedicated and talented gallery staff, especially Anna Farrow and Erin Dorn, was invaluable. A special thanks to John Kramer for designing such a handsome catalog.

— Robert McClain, McClain Gallery

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FOREWORD Despite the frequent exposure and familiarity, Picasso’s oeuvre retains its power to startle and to seduce; his inventiveness remains inexhaustible. Any exhibition of his work is bound to surprise even the most knowledgeable observer, and I look forward with great anticipation to the retrospective of Picasso prints that McClain Gallery has assembled for Houston.

Given that this exhibition is mounted at an art gallery, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the role that gallerists have played in the creation and promotion of Picasso’s work.

Although the artist is most closely associated with the German-born promoter of Cubism, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who represented Picasso briefly before the First World War, and again after the Second World War, it was the canny and irascible Ambroise Vollard who made possible many, if not most, of the prints in this exhibition. Vollard is best remembered as the Parisian gallerist who, at the turn of the twentieth century, discovered Cézanne and Gauguin toward the end of their careers; and as the man who launched Fauvism with Derain, Vlaminck, and Matisse. But Vollard’s relationship with Picasso was absolutely crucial to the career of the young Spaniard, and, for the rest of Vollard’s life, they made great art together.

Vollard gave Picasso his first show in Paris, in 1901, when the artist was not yet twenty years old. Following what was then a formula, Vollard sold almost everything, but kept nothing for himself, not even the portrait that Picasso made of him. It took the urging of Leo and Gertrude Stein, young American collectors in Paris, for Vollard to see the value of Picasso’s art. Following their suggestion, Vollard bought a huge trove of Picasso’s canvases in 1906, making him owner of most of the great works from Picasso’s Blue and Rose Periods; after that he bought a cache every year until 1912, essentially subsidizing the artist’s studio production, enabling him to buy the finest drawing papers and large canvases. In September 1911, Vollard bought a miscellany of fifteen copper plates, drypoint and etchings, as well as some plaster and clay sculptures which he had cast in bronze.

Vollard steel-faced the plates to produce an edition of 250 called The Saltimbanque Suite.

For the first time, Picasso’s work began to be distributed across Europe and America, and The Frugal Repast, the largest of the plates, entered the pantheon of iconic European etchings. Once again, Vollard did not keep the great Cubist portrait that Picasso made of him in gratitude, selling it instead to one of his Russian collectors. But until Vollard’s death in 1939, the gallerist was the principal publisher of Picasso’s graphic oeuvre and intimately involved with his sculptural production.

Picasso was miserable sitting out the First World War in Paris. Vollard was one of the few dealers in operation, and they kept in touch, supplying works to the still-active art market in New York. Although Picasso signed lucrative contracts with socially prominent dealers after the war, Léonce Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein, the most productive relationship was with Vollard. By the end of the 1920s, he had commissioned illustrations for Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, whose themes of artist and model, abstraction

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Picasso working on etching Les coulisses du tableau: odalisque et peintre.

Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins 1970. Photo: Edward Quinn

and representation, became the predominant motifs of Picasso’s work in the 1920s and 1930s, and the basis for the extraordinary Vollard Suite, 100 plates executed over nearly a decade and printed in 1938. Picasso installed his young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter in Vollard’s country house, Boisgeloup, and the sculptures he produced there, inspired

by Marie-Thérèse, are ever present in the Vollard Suite. Picasso’s wonder at the delight he experienced with his young lover is memorialized in the Satyr Unveiling a Nymph. As Picasso’s marriage to Olga Khokhlova disintegrated, Picasso gave vent to his self-pity in great images like The Blind Minotaur and his gesamtkunstwerk, the Minotauromachy. Indeed, in times of distress, Picasso worked through his demons by working on prints and drawings, rather than painting and sculpture. Many of the plates of the Vollard Suite represent a collaboration with the master printer Roger Lacourière, who remained Picasso’s collaborator long after Vollard’s death: Vollard did not live to see the printing of the witty and charming illustrations for Buffon’s Bestiaire. The artist’s unceasing experimentation with Lacourière led to new techniques and unseen effects that continue to impress.

After the close of the Second World War, Picasso moved definitively to the south of France, where he took up new media he had not previously explored. His work in linocut, and

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especially color linocut, represents a high point in his graphic oeuvre, even if much of the imagery harks back to masters of previous centuries. As Picasso entered his seventies he seemingly entered into dialogue with his private pantheon of previous masters — Cranach, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Degas — without knowing that he would have nearly two decades of work ahead of him. And while his output in the 1950s and 1960s was sometimes derided by his former admirers, the freshness and vitality of the work continues to inspire artists to this day. While the winsome Saltimbanques harken back to another world long gone, Picasso’s late work retains its urgency with universal themes of love and life, artmaking and death. The sweep of graphic work that McClain has brought together proves yet again that works of art can truly transcend time.

— Gary Tinterow

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CATALOG OF THE EXHIBITION The plates that follow are a selection from the over 50 prints included in Imagining Backwards: Seven Decades of Picasso Master Prints at McClain Gallery.

Art historian Charles Stuckey has provided essays for twelve of the works and an ­overview of the Vollard Suite. Mr. Stuckey’s text provides a rich context for the artist’s iconic imagery by examining Picasso’s mastery of printmaking techniques, the artist’s personal musings, and coinciding influential life and world events.

THE FRUGAL MEAL b1 | 1904 | Etching with drypoint | 18¼ × 14¾ inches

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ith its emphasis on the eroticized male gaze and the unconventional presentation of superimposed images, both key factors in Picasso’s art for the rest of his life, his drypoint Salomé is a watershed work. Salomé belongs to Picasso’s first sustained attempt at printmaking begun not long after the twenty-two-year-old artist returned to Paris in 1904 to settle in the so-called Bateau Lavoir, a dilapidated Montmartre building where many struggling artists were neighbors. Picasso already listed six prints without titles in the catalogue for a group exhibition at the Galerie Serrurier that opened on February 25, 1905. Although it is impossible to know whether or not Salomé was among these, this exhibition served as a catalyst for Picasso’s close friendship with the poets André Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire. Seemingly a response to Picasso’s drypoint, or an inspiration for it, Apollinaire himself published a poem entitled “Salomé” at the end of 1905. On November 2 the poet had already sent the artist a postcard with these verses.

Salomé [1] is the largest of only five surviving prints that Picasso signed and dated in the plate at this time. Roughly a dozen impressions were printed at the workshop of Auguste and Eugène Delâtre. At the end of September 1911, Picasso sold the plates for fifteen of his early prints to the legendary dealer Ambroise Vollard. Vollard had them steel-faced and published in a large edition (250) by the printer Paul Fort, available at the end of 1913 as an album entitled Saltimbanques. (Unfortunately, Vollard did not request a preface from Apollinaire.) In addition to Salomé, the album included a smaller drypoint (not signed in the plate) known as The Barbaric Dance, which shows the same overweight Herod accompanied again by a naked consort and the same servant holding a platter. Although both drypoints show the sort of incompletely resolved figures associated with pages in an artist’s sketchbook, there is a stark difference in style between the elegantly outlined figures in Salomé and the caricaturized figures in The Dance, a Jarry-esque spoof of the popular Salomé tale. Which version came first is not known.

Biblical themes are something of a rarity in Picasso’s work, [2] so his choice of the Salomé story (recounted in the Gospels of Mathew and Mark), seems to be primarily a response to numerous depictions of the murderous seductress in works by Symbolist artists, including Gustave Moreau (with whom Henri Matisse studied), Edvard Munch and Aubrey Beardsley (who in 1894 provided illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s dramatization of the Salomé story).

André Salmon’s recollection that he heard the bells of the nearby church of Saint Jean de Montmartre when he first visited Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir [3] studio might help to explain the choice of subject. Most of Picasso’s 1905 drypoints and etchings document the same neighborhood characters portrayed in his Rose Period paintings and watercolors devoted to itinerant circus performers. For example, Picasso’s Herod was evidently a clown since he appears as his circus self in several other works made at this time.

1 Gary Tinterow, “Picasso and Vollard” in Cézanne to Picasso; Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, ed. Rebecca A. Rabinow, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006, p.112 and 117n50.

2 Fernando Martin Martin, “Del infierno azul al rosa de Bateau-Lavoir” in Picasso: Suite de los Saltimbanquis 1904-1906, Malaga, 2007, p.35-36.

3 See Peter Read, Picasso & Apollinaire, The Persistence of Memory, University of California Press, 2007, p.9.

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SALOMÉ b14 | 1905 | Drypoint | 24¾ × 20 inches

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Paring his image of inessentials like setting and costumes, Picasso represents the climax of a private performance with a naked Salomé attempting to arouse her satiated stepfather by holding her outstretched leg like a cancan dancer, or like the goddess Iris revealing her sex in Auguste Rodin’s controversial sculpture, both familiar to Picasso from his 1900 visit to the Paris World’s Fair. Possibly to avoid censorship, Picasso shows the temptress from the back, but his overriding theme is nevertheless sexual depravity: from the naked mother pimping her shameless daughter to the necrophiliac servant running her fingers through the hair on St. John’s severed head.

What is visually most extraordinary in Picasso’s drypoint, however, are the long horizontal scratches across the middle of the sheet that interfere with the Biblical melodrama like graphic noise. Although it has sometimes been incorrectly asserted that these lines are the residue of some incompletely erased image on a previously used copper plate, in fact they appear to be the result of some accidental mishandling of the plate before Picasso had begun to incise his image. By opting not to remove these scratches, Picasso asserted an unprecedented avant-garde disregard for professional printmaking standards, while he simultaneously stressed the essential role of multiple superimposed images in his art as a whole. Although there are examples of residual images in signed Picasso paintings from as early as 1901 (for example, Le Gourmet at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.), printmaking seems to have inspired him to emphasize the interaction of competing visual data as never before. The extent to which Picasso incorporated the accidental scratches into his Salomé drypoint remains an open question. Did he show the mother Herodias glancing to the left to suggest that the scratches have distracted her? Did he possibly intend for the scratches to target Salomé’s acrobatics like the rays of a spot light? In the decades to come, it would be Picasso’s ability to orchestrate first thoughts and superimposed second thoughts into single concentrated images that sets him apart as one of the greatest printmakers of any era.

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MAN WITH DOG b28 | 1915 | Etching | 237⁄8 × 197⁄8 inches

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endered for the most part with simple outlines, Picasso’s lighthearted etching from early 1915 of a gentleman seated to read a newspaper in an off-kilter room is among his most elaborate late Cubist works in any medium.

After a lapse of four to five years, Picasso had returned to intaglio printing in 1909, now as a Cubist artist. He undertook the majority of his Cubist prints as illustrations to accompany texts by his poet friends published by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, his primary dealer. When war broke out in August 1914, however, Kahnweiler’s successful promotion of Cubism came to a sudden end. Obliged as a German pacifist to live in exile in Switzerland, Kahnweiler forfeited all his assets in Paris as an enemy alien, including his personal art collection and his large inventory of works by Picasso and the other leading Cubists. No less suddenly, Picasso’s closest friends, including Georges Braque, André Derain and then Guillaume Apollinaire were mobilized for combat. Derain left his German Shepherd Sentinelle in Picasso’s care. Resting on a rug in Picasso’s etching, Sentinelle looks up expectantly.

Man with Dog is the largest of only a handful of etchings that Picasso made during the War. Although Picasso pulled a few impressions himself, he had no publisher. Later, in 1930, when the veteran dealer Ambroise Vollard purchased the plate, Picasso made some minor adjustments to the little white areas. The smaller of these indicates the face of the seated man, his nose and eyebrows suggested graphically with a “t” sign that Picasso invented for highly abstracted heads featured in his early 1913 papier collés. The larger white area represents one side of the opened newspaper that the man is reading. Even so, the etching remained unpublished during Vollard’s lifetime. It was his brother Lucien who had the copper plate steel-faced to facilitate the publication of an edition in 1947.

Newspapers with their bold masthead typography are ubiquitous in Cubist paintings and collages beginning by late 1910, appropriately up-to-the-minute details for these, at that time, ultra-modern images of ordinary life. [1] Describing the day’s realities abstracted into lines and columns of text printed on multiple flat rectangular pages, newspapers as observed objects are alternatives in concept, format and size to Cubist still-life and genre paintings with familiar objects and figures translated into a new quasi-abstract language expressed as separate planes of overlapping visual information. Like the words in a printed sentence collaborating to describe newsworthy events in the world outside, the outlined details in Man with Dog interlink pictorially to give an experienced account of the here and now in a cluttered interior.

In some ways Picasso’s etching qualifies as a self-portrait. His favorite newspaper was Le Journal, indicated here by the letters of its masthead, minus half of the “N,” along with the final “A” and “L.” Directly under the reader’s nose, the “J” in the masthead is backwards.

Rather than draw everything in reverse like an expert printmaker concerned to make reality appear as it should when finally printed, the Cubist in Picasso took over here, mixing viewpoints to see every which way at once. The summary view indicated through the window at the left has been identified as Montparnasse Cemetery and beyond it the base of 1 Robert Rosenblum, “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism” in Picasso 1881/1973, eds, Sir Roland Penrose and John Golding, London, Paul Elek Ltd. 1973, p.49 ff.

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the Eiffel Tower, visible from Picasso’s studio in the rue Schoelcher where he had moved in 1913. The rectangles visible behind the reader at right suggest blank canvases propped against one another on worktables, the legs of which are indicated as simple profiles.

Seated in his studio with Le Journal and Sentinelle, Picasso recalls the intellectual give and take he enjoyed with Derain, Braque and Apollinaire before the War. Specifically, Man with Dog seems to refer to a painting by Derain that Kahnweiler had recently sold to the great Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, a life-sized “portrait” of a seated businessman with a copy of Le Journal in his hands, the figure crudely simplified like the early figurative works

by Paul Cézanne or those of the recently deceased Henri Rousseau. Apollinaire provided the satirical title: Chevalier X — indicating that the anonymous man portrayed has been awarded the Légion d’Honneur. Most exceptional about Derain’s painting was how, rather than paint an image of the newspaper, he had simply glued an issue of the newspaper as a readymade object on his canvas, responding directly to Braque and Picasso’s 1913 collages that incorporate clippings from real newspapers as details. With Man with Dog, Picasso recalls this interrupted dialogue about representation at the heart of Cubism.

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THE THREE FRIENDS b76 | 1923 | Etching | 163⁄8 × 11¾ inches

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FACE OF MARIE THÉRÈSE b95 | 1928 | Lithograph | 10¼ × 83⁄8 inches

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FRONT-FACING PORTRAIT OF MARIE THÉRÈSE b276 | 1934 | Aquatint, etching and drypoint| 17¾ × 133⁄8 inches

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bstracted into heavily outlined vegetable forms that correspond to a cheek, a nose, brows and eyeballs, Picasso’s iconic Head of Marie Thérèse ostensibly portrays his young mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter as a prehistoric goddess, a style familiar to Picasso from the more than 20,000-year-old Venus of Lespugue, discovered in 1922 and displayed in Paris at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. But in Picasso’s drypoint, the boldest outlines are visually entangled with fainter images of facial features, apparent vestiges of preliminary and intermediary efforts to represent this head to satisfaction, as if nothing less than the dense compilation of his graphic efforts from beginning to end could do justice to his subject. Orchestrating all these incompletely erased palimpsest images together this way, in what could be described as a Babel of lines, Picasso effectively represents the kaleidoscopic identities of a “hundred-headed woman” in the spirit of Max Ernst’s extraordinary 1929 collage novel, La Femme sans têtes. With its rollicking graphic freedom, Head of Marie Thérèse, may resemble surrealist automatic drawings made without looking, but it is nothing of the sort. Picasso worked obsessively on this image during February 1933, in the weeks leading up to a burst of printmaking activity devoted to the etchings at the heart of what evolved into the Vollard Suite, each some imaginary episode in the studio life of a classical sculptor, the details all concisely rendered in lyrical outlines. More than a dozen of these etchings created in March and April include a sculpture more or less resembling the Head of Marie Thérèse.

Indeed, Head of Marie Thérèse is an image of a sculpture as much as it is an image of a face. [1] More specifically, it is a composite based upon a group of plaster reliefs and heads with bulbous features that Picasso created in 1931–1932 at his secluded studio in Boisgeloup, north of Paris. Having opted to withhold these surprisingly disfigured heads in plaster from a comprehensive retrospective of his works in 1932, Picasso seemingly grew more than ever obsessed with them.

Working on his own press, he initiated a series of variations based on these sculpted heads on February 16, 1933. [2] He made four different monotypes, wiping the copper plate clean after each printing and starting over, with yet another monotype in the series following a few days later. The copper plate for Head of Marie Thérèse [3] is inscribed on the back with the date of February 18, although it is not clear whether the date refers to when Picasso began this complex intaglio print, or whether it refers to some stage along the way to completion as he reworked his image twenty times, pausing occasionally to make more interrelated monotypes. He devoted himself for nearly a month to images of his recent plaster heads of Marie-Thérèse, in the process distorting their appearance no less than he had distorted his model’s face while making the sculptures.

From the beginning Picasso used tools more easily associated with sculpture than with printmaking for Head of Marie Thérèse. At first he rubbed the plate with sandpaper or 1 Brigitte Baer, Picasso The Engraver, Selections from the Musée Picasso, Paris, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997, p.34-36 2 Baer p.551-555 3 Baer p.556-558

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SCULPTURE, HEAD OF MARIE THÉRÈSE b250 | 1936 | Drypoint | 18½ × 14½ inches

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steel wool to render the face turned to the left. He only introduced outlines in the fourth state, possibly working with a nail. He pulled an impression of each successive state, in keeping with his new fascination to keep records of the stages of this evolving creative process, an idea shared by Matisse. For the sixth state Picasso created one of his strange hallmark double images, adding a half of a frontal face to the left of the face in profile, creating a whole face from two mismatched half faces that seem to converse. Evidently frustrated after seeing an impression of the seventh state, Picasso scraped off the plate nearly completely and started over with a stylized linear version of the face, now scraping out each new image to begin the plate over again and again, in the process shifting the profile from left to right. The eleventh state shows both the incomplete erasures of earlier attempts and the sort of double image he had achieved in the sixth state. For the next state he indicated the upper part of the face with two frontal eyes, but left the lips in the lower section in profile. And so on. Most curiously, after all this effort, he put aside the final state, which remained unpublished until 1942 when Lacourière printed an edition of fifty-five. After steel-facing the plate in 1961, Jacques Frélaut printed a second edition of sixty-five impressions.

The dizzying beauty of the final image shares some of the premises of well-known works by several of his Paris colleagues, for example, Man Ray’s 1922 double exposure photographic portrait of the Marquise Casati or Jean Cocteau and Alexander Calder’s heads sculpted in wire as drawings in space, made beginning in the 1920s, to present a viewer simultaneously with far and near, inside and out. Most interesting, perhaps, is the relationship between Picasso’s Head of Marie Thérèse and the so-called “Transparencies” exhibited in Paris by Francis Picabia in 1928, paintings with multiple linear images superimposed over one another like apparitions of his young mistress haunting his every pictorial idea.

Having moved his studio to the South of France in 1924, Picabia left his wife for his son’s young governess in 1927. Who could miss the irony that Picabia’s “Marie-Thérèse” was named Olga, like Picasso’s wife?

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PENSIVE WOMAN IN CHAIR, HAND ON CHEEK b218 | 1934 | Engraving | 17½ × 13 inches

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AGENCE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE DE LA RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX ET DU GRAND PALAIS DES CHAMPS-ELYSÉES

THE VOLLARD SUITE The Vollard Suite is comprised of one hundred etchings selected by the ­legendary dealer and publisher with whom Picasso had his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1901. Vollard purchased the plates for Picasso’s earliest intaglio prints and published them in 1913 as La Suite des saltimbanques and in the summer of 1927 he generously compensated Picasso to work with the printer Paul Fort on a suite of etchings to accompany a new edition of Honoré de Balzac’s short story about an artist’s insane efforts to paint his model to perfection. The fortysix-year-old Picasso needed extra income, now that he had embarked on a decade-long affair with Marie-Thèrese Walter, a model nearly thirty years his junior. [1] While his efforts as a printmaker beginning in 1927 allowed him to rival book projects by such colleagues as Giorgio de Chirico and Henri Matisse, Picasso’s incredible output through 1936 is best understood as what Baer has called “an autobiographical lyrical poem” to his mistress. Additionally, Vollard seemed already in 1927 to have proposed a second more ambitious book project that evolved over years. [2] [3] Finally printed in 1939 shortly before the dealer’s death, these one hundred etchings were not distributed on the art market until after World War II. Already in 1928 Kahnweiler introduced Picasso to Bernard Geiser who undertook the creation of a complete catalogue of all Picasso’s prints (published in 1933), [4] and as if to cooperAmbroise Vollard standing in front of Picasso’s ate with the cataloguing Picasso began to date all his graphic Evocación. El entierro de Casagemas. works with the day, month and year of their creation, in effect Photo by Bénard Edmond, before 1910. noting his prints like entries in a pictorial diary of his artistic imagination. But although Vollard’s project would include etchings made already in 1930 at the country house he acquired in Boisgeloup that same year to work in relative privacy on sculptures inspired by Marie-Thérèse, it was only in March 1933 that Picasso engaged himself entirely with the project. At this time, he discovered a master printer capable of replacing the retired Fort; Roger Lacourière, who had already worked at his workshop in Montmartre with Matisse and now was working with Salvador Dali. In three months Picasso created forty-six etchings devoted to episodes in the life of a classical sculptor (a proxy self portrait), his model, and a sculpture of her head that corresponds to the strange plaster heads he had just made at Boisgeloup. Reproductions of three of his new etchings appeared as “The Sculptor’s Parable” in the first issue of a luxurious art maga1 Brigitte Baer, Picasso the Printmaker: Graphics from the Marina Picasso collection, Dallas Museum of Art, 1983, p. 64.

2 Gary Tinterow with research by Asher Ethan and Miller, “Vollard and Picasso.”

3 Rebecca A. Rabinow, “Vollard’s Livres d’Artiste” in Cézanne to Picasso, Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, New York, 2006, pp. 113-114, 117nn 58 and 59 and 212n88.

4 Brassai, Picasso and Company, trans. Francis Price, New York, 1964, p.100.

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zine entitled Minotaure, available starting May 25, 1933 with a cover by Picasso. Indeed, the appearance of the magazine coincided with Picasso’s decision to portray himself as a man with a bull’s head: at least in many of the remaining etchings for the Vollard Suite a minotaur replaces the bearded classical sculptor. Consequently, the completed Vollard Suite can all be understood as meditations on a pagan sculptor’s adventures with a model who inspires ultra-modern art, while her beauty simultaneously awakens the archetypal Minotaur beast in him.

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MUSE SHOWING A PENSIVE MARIE THÉRÈSE HER SCULPTED PORTRAIT b257 | 1933 | Etching and drypoint | 167⁄8 × 13¼ inches

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reated on April 8, 1933, Sculptor and Kneeling Model was among the three etchings for the so-called Vollard Suite selected for reproduction in the first June 1933 issue of the deluxe art magazine Minotaure [1] under the heading “The Sculptor’s Parable.” These epitomized an intense period of printmaking activity: Picasso made 29 etchings for his suite from mid-March through early April, all featuring a bearded male sculptor and/or his model in contemplation of one sculpture or another. Starting on April 5, he worked in a slightly larger format but continued his variations on the studio life of a sculptor in antiquity. The classical mood notwithstanding, Picasso’s variations could be compared to scenes from the sort of story about blind love featured in the 1931 film masterpiece City Lights, written, directed by and starring Charles Chaplin.

Throughout this suite, Picasso casts himself as his own leading man, the bearded sculptor resembling images of Hercules and Zeus familiar from Greco-Roman sculpture. In Sculptor and Model, this theatrical Picasso assumes the pose of a reclining god seated on pillows next to a kneeling female nude with a wreath of flowers in her hair. Of course, the model in all these etchings is a proxy portrait of his young mistress and leading lady, Marie-Thérese Walter. In order to visualize the complex dynamic between them, Picasso includes a slightly larger than life-sized sculpture of his heroic head, brow wrinkled, eyes opened wide, toppled on the floor like a cast off. It is hard not to equate this sculpture psychologically with the trophy heads of martyrs like John the Baptist or Holofernes victimized by women. Vainly absorbed by her own (to us invisible) reflection in a small mirror propped against this sculpted head, the model appears oblivious to the proximity of the admiring sculptor nonchalantly revealing his sex. This etching can be understood as Picasso’s attempt to express what he sees or imagines as an artist contemplating the model’s self-contemplation. We should bear in mind that Picasso had already treated the same theme of a man watching a woman look at herself in a mirror for one of his very first etchings in 1905. Most important from 1926–1936, the mirror with all its legendary powers was a key motif in his art overall. [2] Touching her face with her fingertips, the model appears pensive, melancholy even, as her head is dramatically darkened with etched lines. She seems to be undergoing a metamorphosis, either from consulting the mirror or from reacting to the sculptor’s attention.

His model’s appearance changes in the very process of his observation. In any case, his depiction of the model here is in keeping with the theme of the book illustrations he had provided for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published on his fiftieth birthday in late October 1931.

The blatant graphic discrepancy between the upper part of the model’s body and everything else in Sculptor and Kneeling Model may well be an indication of Picasso’s interest in Rembrandt’s legacy as a printmaker. Rembrandt sometimes printed etchings that were intentionally incomplete, with only a few elaborated details emerging from otherwise vague compositions, thus juxtaposing different levels of representation in a single image. Indeed, by the end of January 1934, Picasso went so far as to introduce portraits of Rembrandt 1 Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso, Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p.540-550.

2 Lydia Gasman, Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso, 125-1938: Picasso and the surrealist Poets, Columbia University Ph. D., 1981, p.1082 ff.

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SCULPTOR AND KNEELING MODEL b178 | 1933 | Etching | 17¾ × 133⁄8 inches

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into several etchings to be included in the so-called Vollard Suite. [1] [2] Aware of Picasso’s respect for the Dutch artist’s heritage, as much as she was aware of his infidelities, his estranged wife Olga would later send him reproductions of Rembrandt’s work as a taunt: “If you were more like him, you would be a great artist.”

1 Janie Cohen, “Picasso’s Dialogue with Rembrandt’s Art” in Etched on the Memory; The presence of Rembrandt in the prints of Goya and Picasso, Amsterdam, 2000, p.80 – 122.

2 Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p.149.

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he first issue of the luxurious art magazine Minotaure that appeared at the end of May 1933, featured dozens of photographs by Brassaï showing Picasso’s recent experimental sculptures, including a lost stick figure construction about thirty inches high dangling a toy airplane from the end of a string. Intrigued with the many different ways to convey realism in art, Picasso had incorporated everyday objects into his sculptures as early as 1913, but his only other distinctly Dada/Surrealist constructions were never realized. His ideas remained fantasies for sculptures that he represented in etchings made in the spring of 1933. On May 4, for example, Picasso imagined an assemblage sculpture of a woman in a chair as a wildly anachronistic element in one of his etchings devoted to the studio life of a bearded Greco-Roman sculptor.

Marie Thérèse Considering Her Own Sculpted Effigy looks like a cartoon poking fun at modern art: the naked model with a wreath of flowers in her hair ponders her relationship to this bizarre three-dimensional representation of herself. While she touches herself with her right hand, the model cautiously extends her left hand to touch a summer dress with a tiny floral pattern that is one ingredient of the avant-garde assemblage situated on a simple flat base. As if in sympathy with the model’s perplexity, the landscape visible behind her outside the window seems especially agitated. Besides the stiffly starched dress, the assemblage incorporates parts of a Louis XVI side chair with cabriole legs and an upholstered back decorated with an embroidered butterfly approaching a flower. An open little book and two balls resting on a seat cushion are a more crudely symbolic representation of sexuality. The sculptor has used a rod as a substitute for the torso of the woman whose “breasts” are two suspended little balls something like those in the governor for a motor. The head also appears mechanical, composed of a ball gripped in a U-shaped clamp, with two eyes balanced on top. For hair there is some fringe. The arms look like long gloves stuffed with sawdust.

Interestingly, in early 1933 Picasso’s brilliant young friend, Salvador Dali, was making etchings to illustrate Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont with the same master printer, Roger Lacourière whom Picasso engaged to print his etchings destined for Vollard. Around the time that Picasso made Marie Thérèse Considering Her Own Sculpted Effigy, he had evidently agreed to exhibit three sculptures at a group show of Surrealist objects to take place from June 7–18, 1933, at the Galerie Pierre Colle, but he changed his mind at the last minute. There is a piece of paper pasted over Picasso’s name in the published checklist. Among the highlights of the exhibition were some of Dali’s Surrealist objects. No longer extant, one work consisted of a real Art Nouveau chair with its cushions replaced by replicas cast in chocolate and with one of its legs inserted into a glass of beer. Another was the Retrospective Buste of a Woman, today in collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. For this work Dali used a nineteenth-century porcelain bust of a woman made for the display of wigs. [1] He painted ants on the face and adorned it with odd items of couture, including a real baguette for a hat. According to Dali, when Picasso came to the exhibition his dog devoured the bread.

1 The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, New York, 1942, opposite p.262.

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MARIE THÉRÈSE CONSIDERING HER OWN SCULPTED EFFIGY b187 | 1933 | Etching | 19¾ × 15¼ inches

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ddly enough, in 1930 and 1931 when Picasso made thirty etchings for Albert Skira’s edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he omitted any image of the bullheaded male offspring of Pasiphaë who had mated with a sacred white bull.

Widespread interest in the tale of the minotaur’s captivity in a maze where he fed on sacrificial victims accompanied the excavations of the Bronze Age palace complex at Knossos in Crete undertaken in 1900 by Sir Arthur Evans and published to acclaim starting in 1921.

Among Picasso’s close associates, Giorgio de Chirico repeatedly incorporated an ancient sculpture of the sleeping Ariadne, the minotaur’s disloyal half-sister, into his disturbing pre–World War I paintings of abandoned plazas. As the embodiment of uncivilized male sexuality lurking in a labyrinth of desires, the minotaur especially interested the surrealists versed in Freud’s theories of the subconscious. Skira commissioned Picasso to provide a cover for the first issue of the lavishly illustrated arts journal, Minotaure [1] which appeared in late May 1933, devoted to the most significant contemporary art, archaeology and art history, surrealism definitely included.

Although Picasso made occasional representations of the minotaur in the late 1920s, Skira’s commission seemingly inspired Picasso to identify himself with this chimera who first appears in the Vollard Suite etching made on May 17, 1933 as a stand-in for the bearded classical sculptor featured in the previous images for the suite. The following day he made an etching showing the model Marie-Thérèse Walter observing the minotaur asleep. Inscribed in the plate, June 18, 1933, the drypoint Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman was the last of eleven plates which Picasso devoted during the next month to an ever more sexually aggressive minotaur who meets his death in something like a bullfight arena. Picasso rendered all of these images in the predominantly linear style characteristic of his works for the Vollard Suite through 1933. For Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, Picasso portrayed the minotaur kneeling over his sleeping model, her head cradled in her hands. Nearly too big to fit on his plate, the minotaur in outline nevertheless seems insubstantial, like an apparition.

With his mistress model oblivious to any threat, the subject now conformed to a theme that had obsessed Picasso for thirty years already: images of himself observing his partner sleep. [2] Indeed, one of the first subjects already undertaken by Picasso for the Vollard Suite in June 1931 is an image of himself lifting a sheet off of a sleeping woman. Considering the deeply personal associations, it hardly seems surprising that Picasso decided to return to Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, possibly as early as November 1933, when he devoted several drawings to this same beauty and the beast image, but certainly after his passion as a printmaker matured from a close working relationship with Roger Lacourière, who would print all the Vollard Suite plates in 1939.

At this second stage Picasso scribbled staccato lines to stress the minotaur’s tensed muscles and stretched bed sheets. As a result, the minotaur’s graphically compressed anatomy seems ready to explode. Elaborately darkening the minotaur’s furry head and the 1 Martin Ries, Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur, Arts Journal, winter 1972-1973, vol. 32, no. 2.

2 Leo Steinberg, “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers” in Other Criteria, Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, New York, 1972, p.92-114.

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MINOTAUR CARESSING A SLEEPING WOMAN b201 | 1933 | Drypoint | 133⁄8 × 17¾ inches

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dark background behind it, Picasso most likely revisited his plate with Rembrandt on his mind, specifically the shadowy 1659 etching of the sleeping Antiope gently approached

by Jupiter as a faun ready to rape her. Picasso would have been familiar with countless sexist representations of women oblivious to similar bestial danger, among them: Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), with the beast on the woman’s chest treated as a symbolic projection of her inner torments, Gustave Doré’s 1867 illustrations for the sometimes frightening fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and the unsettling 1897 painting The Sleeping Gypsy [1] now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by Henri Rousseau, whom Picasso celebrated with a banquet in 1908.

As an image of himself in the act of looking, Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman is a remarkable revelation. Courting the twenty-two-year-old Françoise Gilot in 1943, the sixty-two-year-old Picasso explained, “A minotaur can’t be loved for himself.... At least he doesn’t think he can.” Showing her an impression of Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, he went on: “He’s studying her, trying to read her thoughts... trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster.” “It’s hard to say,” he concluded, “whether he wants to wake her or kill her.” [2]

1 For other examples, see Sandra Buratti-Hasan and Sara Vitacca, Bacchanales Modernes! Le nu, l’ivresse et la danse dans l’art français du XIXe siècle, Bordeaux, 2016.

2 Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p.44.

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sure sign of his growing ambitions as a printmaker with Lacourière’s workshop at his disposal, Picasso’s June 12, 1934 Woman Bullfighter, is the largest print he had yet undertaken, anticipating his equally large 1935 Minotauromachy etching which features the same characters — a dying horse, a dying female matador, and a minotaur (instead of a bull) — all immersed in a more elaborate nocturnal allegory.

As personal allegory, Woman Bullfighter shows spectators at an arena looking on while a bull with somewhat human facial features prepares to kiss Marie-Thérèse Walter, who is draped across its back in a swoon of sexual abandon, all but completely stripped of the richly embroidered matador’s costume she is wearing, her hair loosened and falling in disarray. Positioned where it hides the animal’s penis, her left hand clings to the handle of a puntilla that is no threat whatsoever to the amorous bull whose weight is toppling a picador’s horse, its head raised in futile sacrificial agony. The three intertwined characters are posed in something like a parody of Giambologna’s famous 1582 public sculpture in Florence, The Rape of the Sabine Women composed of three nude figures in a spiraling struggle for sexual victory. But the mythical rape evoked in Picasso’s 1934 etching is that of Europa, a favorite subject in Old Master art, who was abducted by Zeus in the disguise of a bull (and who would become the mother-in-law of Pasiphaë who in turn gave birth to the minotaur). Presumably, Picasso had some awareness of Matisse’s never fulfilled ambition in the late 1920s to complete a large painting on the theme of The Rape of Europa.

The Europa myth aside, Picasso’s operatic etching is the delayed fulfillment of a pictorial idea documented in a group of pencil sketches made no later than the early 1920s, perhaps with a theatrical production in mind. These show a bull attacking a rider-less picador’s horse, and the most elaborate one includes a male matador fallen backwards across the charging bull’s back. Suggesting that the idea became something of an obsession, two of the thirteen etchings that Picasso made in 1927 to accompany a new edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, include a bull and a horse as adversaries, even though the text has nothing whatsoever to do with bullfighting. As for the figure falling backwards, Picasso invented a variety of both male and female examples, one draped over a horse, another over a bull, when he undertook etchings in 1931 for Skira’s deluxe edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Finally, as for Picasso’s beauty and the beast imagery, it evolved most significantly in etchings for the Vollard Suite [1] made in the spring of 1933 showing episodes from the studio life of a naked bearded classical sculptor (a thinly disguised reference to himself). In one etching the resting sculptor and his model ponder a large sculpture of a bull with a nude Europa draped over its back. Another shows the minotaur in the studio as the sculptor’s (and Picasso’s) alter ego with the naked model fallen across his lap anticipating the female matador’s pose in his large 1934 etching. [2] Promising to send his mistress Marie-Thérèse a love note every day, in the summer of 1933 Picasso was able to attend bullfights when he returned to Spain with his wife Olga and their son Paulo. It is not known whether brand new liberal divorce laws in Spain were a motivation for the trip. Once back in France in September, however, Picasso painted a 1 Bloch, Georges, Pablo Picasso, catalogue de l’oeuvre gravé et lithographié, 4 vol, Berne: Kornfeld and Klipstein, 1968-1979, B165.

2 Bloch 192.

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WOMAN BULLFIGHTER b1329 | 1934 | Etching | 221⁄8 × 301⁄8 inches

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small oil showing an enraged bull, with both a white horse and a de-robed female matador across his back. [1] Two weeks later he made a slightly larger oil on the same scene, except that the matador is male and clothed, while the horse has been gored in the abdomen.

These works, like the great etching of June 12, 1934, [2] the four smaller etchings made on the same theme during the next two weeks, and the large format Bullfight with Female Matador, all express Picasso’s guilt in allegorical terms as a monster (bull/minotaur) who causes pain to all the women in his private life (Olga represented symbolically as the horse; Marie-Thérèse as the ineffective matador). As painfully troubling as it is beautiful, Woman Bullfighter is an attempt at self-analysis and revelation. At the time that he made it, Picasso already planned to return to Spain with Olga and Paulo to see bullfights in the summer of 1934, briefly postponing the inevitable: Marie-Thérèse became pregnant at the end of the year, and Picasso and Olga separated after consulting divorce lawyers. As staged in Woman Bullfighter, Picasso’s ongoing emotional turmoil became a leitmotif in his art for the next three years, reappearing at the center of his elaborate 1935 Minotauromachy etching and again in his 1937 mural Guernica.

1 Bernadac, Marie-Laure, Michèle Richet, Hélène Seckel, Musée Picasso: Catalogue sommaire des collections, II, Dessins, Aquarelles, Gouaches, Pastels. Paris: Réunion Des Musées Nationaux, 1987, p.144.

2 Bloch 220-221, 280-281, and 1330.

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THE GREAT CORRIDA, WOMAN BULLFIGHTER b1330 | 1934 | Etching | 22¼ × 30¼ inches

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FAUNUS UNVEILING A SLEEPING WOMAN (JUPITER AND ANTIOPE AFTER REMBRANDT) b230 | 1936 | Aquatint | 15¼ × 19¾ inches

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PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR WITH BUN, I b291 | 1936 | Drypoint | 20¼ × 13 inches

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PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR WITH BUN, II b292 | 1936 | Drypoint | 20¼ × 15¾ inches

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icasso’s earliest efforts as an artist in support of the democratically elected Republic of Spain in its brutal Civil War against the right wing armies under General Francisco Franco, The Dream and Lie of Franco are the best-known of all his prints. When he first etched the two plates on January 8 and 9, 1937, Picasso had been the honorary director of the Prado in abstentia for nearly four months, [1] and he was awaiting the arrival a delegation from the Republican government in Paris to discuss plans for the Spanish Pavilion to be erected as part of the summer 1937 World’s Fair. Picasso showed the delegation impressions of his etchings at this early stage, and he read them a poem written in response to the Civil War. In keeping with the stream of consciousness style that Picasso had developed beginning in 1935, when for nearly a year he had abandoned images for words, his text would finally be included with both finished etchings in a portfolio entitled Sueño y mentira de Franco, the large edition published to raise funds for the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign. After the savage bombing of civilians at Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso quickly painted a protest mural in shades of black and white for the Spanish Pavilion, incorporating many of the same motifs rendered on the scale of book illustrations for the Dream and Lie etchings, the final four vignettes completed on June 7. It is not known at what date he added tone to his outlined images by re-working his plates using sugarlift aquatint.

By some accounts, his original idea was to make prints consisting each of nine separate vignettes or frames about the size of post cards to sell individually to World’s Fair visitors. [2] This might explain why Picasso felt no need to arrange the frames in any particular narrative order. Picasso had recently made illustrations this way for a book of poems by his friend Paul Eluard entitled La Barre d’appui [3], with the little images rendered on the quadrants of a single plate and printed together, but subsequently cut out as separate illustrations. But Picasso may have wanted The Dream and Lie etchings to conform to the full-sheet comic book format that was used by propaganda artists on both sides of the Civil War. [4] Picasso had himself already made a comic strip format print as the visualized table of contents for Vollard’s 1931 edition of Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu. [5] [6] Gertrude Stein recalled that Picasso eagerly awaited installments of American newspaper comics, like “The Katzenjammer Kids”. Of course, as a connoisseur of graphic art, Picasso realized that his etchings belonged to a long tradition of war suites, from Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes misères de la guerre, published in 1633, to Francisco Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra, posthumously published in 1863.

In terms of style, however, Franco’s character is grotesque rather than comic, [7] notably similar in spirit to Alfred Jarry’s puppet-like imaginary dictator, King Ubu, long venerated

1 Robin Adele Greeley, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press, 2006, p.152.

2 Roland Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, rev. ed., 1971, p.304-306.

3 Eluard, La Barre d’appui, ed. of 13, prior to being cut into four parts.

4 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low, Modern Art and Popular Culture, The Museum of Modern Art, 1990, p.179-181.

5 Table of contents for Balzac (B94) 1927 (or 1931).

6 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, New York, 1933, pp. 23, 25-26.

7 Steven A. Nash, “Introduction: Picasso, War, and Art” in Picasso and the War Years, 1937 — 1945, San Francisco, 1998, p.16.

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THE DREAM AND LIE OF FRANCO (BOARD I) b297 | 1937 | Etching and aquatint | 15 × 22½ inches

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THE DREAM AND LIE OF FRANCO (BOARD II) b298 | 1937 | Etching and aquatint | 157⁄8 × 22½ inches

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by Picasso’s closest colleagues, like Guillaume Apollinaire and Ambroise Vollard. [1] In fact, the monstrous head of Franco in these etchings, resembling a misshapen hairy carrot or potato, evolved from a sheet of sketches he made on April 16, 1936, showing how to transform an image of a naked model with her arm raised into a hideous bladder-like face with penile and vaginal features. This genitalia face, enhanced with a moustache, a toothy grin and a tiny crown, appears in all of the nine frames that comprise Picasso’s January 8 plate for The Dream and Lie of Franco and in three of the earliest frames for his second plate begun on January 8, but not completed until June 7. Always armed with a sword and a banner, Picasso’s Franco wears a skirt, underneath which his huge erect penis and hairy testicles are visible in two of the frames on the first plate: walking a tightrope in one and ejaculating snakes and frogs in another. In several frames Franco rides a horse that has been disemboweled by his enemy the bull, just like the disemboweled horses in Picasso’s etchings of a female matador from 1934. In the central frame of the second plate the disemboweled horse has Franco’s head and tiny figures with Spanish Republican flags emerge from its spilled intestines. Six of the frames in the second plate, however, ignore Franco per se to show the victims of his carnage, fallen bodies in some, screaming women holding dead children in others with their features and gestures distorted into hieroglyphs for the incredible agonies.

1 Herschel B. Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica, University of California Press, 1988, p.104.

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THE WEEPING WOMAN III ba625 | 1937 | Drypoint and aquatint | 19¼ × 13¾ inches

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THE WEEPING WOMAN IV ba626 | 1937 | Drypoint | 20 × 12¾ inches

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HEAD OF WOMAN NO. 7 PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR b1336 | 1939 | Engraving | 17½ × 13¼ inches

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he poet Paul Éluard introduced the fifty-four-year-old Picasso to the twenty-eight-year-old photographer Dora Maar in late 1935, around the time that the twenty-six-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter (his primary muse and mistress since 1927) gave birth to their daughter. After seventeen years of marriage, Picasso had separated from his forty-four-year-old wife Olga Khokhlova in June 1935. A left-wing activist and participant in the surrealist group, Maar lived around the corner from Picasso, whom she famously intrigued by quickly stabbing a knife between her fingers at a café table for effect. She immediately became the principal woman in his life and art until the advent of the twenty-three-year-old painter Françoise Gilot in 1943. Having spent her childhood in Argentina, the Spanish-speaking Maar helped Picasso address the Spanish Civil War as an artist in exile, at first treating their relationship as a sort of collaboration, rather than accepting only the role of muse. In 1937 she accompanied Picasso in his new studio, documenting every stage in the highly charged evolution of his anti-Facist mural Guernica in photographs. As an outgrowth of this shared commitment Picasso was inspired to make dozens of paintings and drawings with Maar in the role of the universal “weeping woman.”

Working at the Montmartre workshop of Roger Lacourière nearly every afternoon during the first half of 1939, Picasso dedicated himself for the first time to printmaking in color, a complicated process obliging him to work simultaneously on several interrelated plates, each used for one of the different colors in the final composite image. Speaking generally, overlapping images are a mainstay in Picasso’s art throughout his long career. In the case of Head of a Woman No. 2, he juggled four plates, working primarily with sugarlift aquatint: one plate for yellow, one for pinks, one for blues, and one for black. He inscribed the date April 20, 1939 at the top of the blue plate. Besides brushing his colors on each appropriate plate with a sugar solution, Picasso used a drypoint tool and a scraper to add more linear elements, like strands of hair. Although impressions of the final image were printed in 1939, it seems likely that was not until 1942 that Lacourière oversaw the printing of something like a full edition, a complex undertaking. [1] The carefully aligned plates were printed one after the other on to each sheet of paper, without leaving time in between for the different inks to dry. The resulting interlocking shapes of color portray Maar brightly, as a vivacious woman with wide-open eyes.

Picasso already boasted in September 1936 that he could make a portrait of Maar from memory, and the image in Head of a Woman No. 2, with the nostrils emphasized, rather closely conforms to Picasso’s earliest images of her, before she became a “weeping woman” in his artist’s eyes. [2] She was his favorite subject. Several photographs taken by Maar document how Picasso’s studio filled up with paintings of her, many of them close-ups of her head and shoulders, just as he had previously stockpiled images of Olga and MarieThérèse. Created in collaboration with Lacourière’s workshop during the spring of 1939, Head of a Woman belongs to a series of seven aquatints, six of them printed in color, each

1 Brigitte Baer, Picasso Peintre-Graveur, vol. III, Bern, 1986, p.185-189.

2 Charles Stuckey, “The Face of Picasso’s Lithography” in Picasso and Françoise Gillot, Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953, ed. John Richardson, New York, 2012, p.165-168.

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HEAD OF WOMAN NO. 2 PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR b1340 | 1939 | Color aquatint | 17¾ × 13¼ inches

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a different close-up image of Maar. Seemingly, Picasso wanted to present them together as a testament to his affection.

The memoirs of Picasso’s personal manager, Jaime Sabartés, reveal that these colorful portraits in aquatint were intended for a never realized edition of the artist’s collected writings. [1] The artist had all but given up making images for a full year beginning in April 1935 to devote himself to automatic writing in an attempt to capture his own complex stream of consciousness. Many colleagues immediately hailed Picasso’s writings, some in French, others in Spanish, and published translations of some of them. Others preferred not to encourage him. Dora Maar could fully appreciate Picasso’s original Spanish texts.

The veteran dealer Ambroise Vollard agreed to cover all the costs of the project and to leave Picasso in charge of all the decisions about what paper, ink and reproduction methods to use. [2] [3] But Vollard died in an automobile accident on July 21, 1939, and with the onset of war later in the year, the collected writings project was forgotten. In addition to the seven aquatint heads, several prints with text fragments and narrow figures for the margins also survive from this project. It seems impossible to underestimate what a tribute Picasso intended in choosing Maar for his pictorial meditations on her “faces” as the graphic equivalent for his deeply personal insights “observed” as texts.

1 Jaime Sabartés, Picasso An Intimate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores, New York, 1948, p.161-173.

2 Rebecca A. Rabinow, “Vollard’s Livres d’Artiste” in Cézanne to Picasso, Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006, p.206 and 212n74.

3 Brigitte Baer, Picasso the Printmaker, Graphics from the Marina Picasso Collection, Dallas Museum of Art, 1983, p.103-104.

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icasso devoted the majority of his lithographs to images of Françoise Gilot, the twenty-two-year-old emerging artist that he first met in 1942. As courtship strategy he introduced her to her idol, Matisse, who immediately offered to paint her, with green hair. Responding to what he took as a challenge, Picasso often portrayed Gilot with reference to works by Matisse, among them The Romanian Blouse [1], 1940 [2] which had been exhibited in Paris in 1945 together with framed photographs of all the stages that preceded the final work. Picasso made his own stylized version of this particular painting as a color lithograph in early 1947, showing the woman, with green hair, seated in a high-backed chair against a black background. The next day he made a closely related painting of Gilot based on the same Matisse, and the next day he painted two more variations. In all the images the fingers of her right hand are opened and those of her left are closed on the arm of the chair, and she wears a colorful blouse with leg of mutton sleeves.

After putting this Matisse-based image of her aside for nearly two years, Picasso seemingly decided at the end of October, 1948 to portray Gilot in advance of her twenty-seventh birthday on November 27, 1948 while she was roughly four months pregnant with their second child. Working from imagination, Picasso posed her in the fur-trimmed jacket that he had brought home as a gift in September 1948 from a Communist Party conference for intellectuals in Poland. Presumably he hoped as an artist to overcome Gilot’s initial dislike of the coat. He made five paintings before deciding to realize his idea as a large multicolor lithograph in November. He imagined the coat from Poland with leg-of-mutton sleeves and in that way he saw Gilot as a grand lady portrayed by an Old Master like Titian or Velasquez. For the lithograph he worked on five zinc plates, one for yellow, one for green (hair, of course), one for red, one for violet and one for black or blue. Counting all the trial impressions pulled as Picasso progressively made new modified states on these plates, he considered nearly three dozen variations, in the process removing any trace of Matisse. As he proceeded he changed Gilot’s appearance every which way over the course of three months, as if his art needed even more stages than Matisse’s did. Finally, on January 3, 1949, he chose Woman in a Chair, No. 4 as one of two lithographs for publication. [3] Celebrating both this artistic fulfillment and the New Year, Picasso immediately switched back to paintings of the same motif, devoting a dozen canvases in this extraordinary series to the final months of Gilot’s pregnancy.

Whereas Gilot is roughly caricatured in many of the trial impressions, in Woman in a Chair, No. 4, Picasso depicts her with hardly any distortion as a female Renaissance paragon like Simonetta Vespucci, her hair seemingly adorned with braids or a headdress of chains. He takes far greater graphic liberties with her costume, the body of which curiously emphasizes her breasts as encircled round shapes decorating either side of the trim down the middle of the jacket. Read as “eyes” rather than as breasts, these circular decorations 1 Paris, Musée national de l’art moderne.

2 Bloch, Georges, Pablo Picasso, catalogue de l’oeuvre gravé et lithographié, 4 vol, Berne: Kornfeld and Klipstein, 1968-1979, B422.

3 Charles Stuckey, “The Face of Picasso’s Lithography” in Picasso and Françoise Gillot, Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953, ed. John Richardson, New York, 2012, p.180-186.

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WOMAN IN CHAIR, NO. 4 b588 | 1949 | Lithograph | 30 × 22¼ inches

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indicate the presence of a second face directly underneath Gilot’s. In some of the various trial impressions this mirage image looks like a Melanesian mask, in others more like the pet owl the couple kept. But for this public image printed in an edition of fifty the phantom face looks a lot like a demonized caricature of Picasso himself, the trim at her waist serving as his shoulders. Separated from her waist by quasi-spermatic white yin and yang shapes, her swollen leg of mutton sleeves are each decorated with stick half-figures with which Picasso represents fashionable embroideries as embryonic signs for their children, Paloma’s birth but a few months off. Signing off on this culminating lithograph that had evolved in his mind over nearly two years Picasso portrayed Gilot as a noble woman and mater familias.

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WOMAN IN CHAIR, NO. 1 M134 | 1949 | Lithograph | 297⁄8× 22¼ inches

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MAN WITH A SHEEP ba682 | March 11, 1955 Engraving with etching and aquatint | 17½ × 25¼ inches

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BUST OF A FEMALE WITH PONYTAIL b771 | 1955 | Aquatint | 297⁄8 × 211⁄8 inches

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BUST IN A CHECKERED BLOUSE b850 | 1958 | Lithograph | 25¾ × 19¾ inches

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WOMAN WITH BLOUSE b847 | 1958 | Lithograph | 26 × 20 inches

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JACQUELINE WITH BLACK KERCHIEF I b873 | 1958 | Lithograph | 26 × 19¾ inches

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PRINTER: PLEASE ADJUST THIS ART TO MATCH TONALITY OF ART OPPOSITE (P.52)

JACQUELINE WITH BLACK KERCHIEF II b874 | 1959 | Lithograph | 25¾ × 19¾ inches

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PORTRAIT OF JACQUELINE’S FACE b1063 | 1962 | Linocut | 295⁄8 × 233⁄8 inches

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ike it or not, most of Picasso’s female partners were subjected to constant representation in his art, although they seldom posed as models considering how Picasso worked from imagination predicated as much on memory as on immediate observation. Jacqueline Roque began to appear ubiquitously in Picasso’s works of art beginning in 1954. Her looks reminded him of models immortalized by the leading nineteenth-century French painters, Eugène Delacroix and Éduouard Manet, and she became his second wife in 1961.

Already by the 1930s Picasso’s repertoire as a figure painter consisted primarily of ­portrait-format images of women: the largest-format works show them seated, the medium-format ones are half-lengths (“bustes”), and the smaller-format paintings are merely heads or even faces, sometimes unconventionally close-up, hardly the sort of item successful in the market for most artists. Pointing out the “face” [1] he saw in a flower, the ninety-year-old Picasso explained his preference to his secretary Miguel Montañés, “If the petals of a flower can suggest a human face, how many things can a face suggest?”

The quasi-hieroglyphic face in Portrait of Jacqueline’s Face is intensely expressive, but no less mysterious for it.

Not surprisingly, Jacqueline’s face is among the iconic images to absorb Picasso when he decided to make linocuts with a local printer named Hidalgo Arnéra, mostly from 1958 through 1963. For his first linocut Picasso translated a portrait of a woman by the sixteenth-century artist Lucas Cranach, using a separate sheet of linoleum for each of six colors, taking pains to keep the registration accurate from plate to plate. Although the result inspired him to continue with the new technique, Picasso henceforth opted to simplify the procedure, re-working a single linoleum plate to print a sequence of color designs from light to dark. In the case of Portrait of Jacqueline’s Face, he started by highlighting parts of her face in café au lait, cutting them out of the plate before printing it again, this time in the light brown color that he used for shadows and the background. With those areas cut out he proceeded to print the hair and then to cut away everything but the black lines and outlines. As a printmaker, Picasso loved working backwards from left to right and he was especially keen to keep track of changes as an idea developed. Moreover, the reduction technique he used for his single-plate linocuts could be described as drawing backwards, from last to first.

Starkly open-eyed, this face seems to be observing itself in a mirror the way it might look in a self-portrait. But mostly the face is a reprise of the mask-like faces that Picasso developed over fifty years before as he worked on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. [2] Thanks to the muted palette of inks, reminiscent of some of Picasso’s classic analytical paintings from around 1910, the face is integrated with the shadowy surrounding space, rather than set objectively against a background. But the fundamental concept here is one that Picasso first developed in the 1920s, when he began to draw whole faces by conjoining half of a frontal face with half of a face in profile, representing his different points of view in order 1 Mariano Miguel Montañés, Pablo Picasso, The Last Years, trans. Luke Sandford, New York, 2004, p.119.

2 Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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to capture the subject as a self-aware being in dialogue with itself. Of course, Picasso’s myriad variations on this sort of double image are full of graphic humor. For example, in Portrait of Jacqueline’s Face, her ears have been switched. Observed in profile, the ear on the left of the linocut ought to be with the profile image of Jacqueline’s face at the right, where we find the smaller image of the ear belonging to the frontal side of the face on the left. Such mismatched details may appear childish, or merely decorative, but Picasso’s double faces like Portrait of Jacqueline’s Face are fundamentally psychological diagrams.

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PORTRAIT OF JACQUELINE IN A STRAW HAT WITH FLOWERS b1075 | 1962 | Linocut | 24½ × 17½ inches

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PICASSO, HIS WORK AND HIS AUDIENCE b1481 | 1968 | Etching | 24¼ × 281⁄8 inches

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n his eighties, Picasso’s health suffered, even if his energy had hardly subsided. Realizing that he would probably not return to Paris, in 1963 the brothers Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, both protégés of the retired Roger Lacourière, decided to set up their print workshop in Mougins, nearby Notre-Dame-de-Vie, the villa outside Cannes where Picasso settled with Jacqueline Roque after their marriage in 1961. Thanks to the Crommelyncks’ encouragement, Picasso’s graphic art flourished as never before.

Perhaps in response to the publication of Georges Bloch’s catalogue raisonné of all his graphic work in 1968, as if to demonstrate that his career was hardly at an end, in the same year Picasso created a suite of three hundred and forty-seven prints, for the most part unabashedly erotic fantasies set in an artist’s studio, at the circus or at a brothel, with a repertoire of comic characters from art history: himself, Rembrandt, El Greco, Raphael and so on. And beginning in early 1970 he extended all these picaresque themes in a new series which would finally consist of one hundred and fifty-six prints, not published or exhibited until after his death in 1973 at the age of ninety-one.

Among the earliest images in this final suite, Ecce Homo, After Rembrandt is especially complex. With some specific idea in mind, Picasso requested that a plate be prepared with a rectangle near the middle protected with varnish for etching, but the rest of the surface grained with resin in preparation for work in aquatint. He treated the rectangle as a stage spectacle intended as a profane rejoinder to Rembrandt’s famous 1655 etching depicting Pilate presenting the captive Christ on a balcony to an angry mob shortly before his execution. The distinctive stone arches supporting the balcony in Rembrandt’s print reappear in Picasso’s, and the figure wearing a turban who looks on at the stage from the wings in Picasso’s version is often identified as Rembrandt, since it is based on a similar figure in his Biblical scene. [1] Gathered together as if for a finale, the actors are all rendered in the simplest outline style, recalling perhaps Picasso’s earliest etchings and drypoints from 1905 with their circus themes. In his prime, Picasso was celebrated for his costumes and stage sets. Center stage in Ecce Homo is a seated man wearing a robe and crown. Gert Schiff described this man [2] as “an aged king perplexed by the pageant surrounding him.” He is flanked with attendants, including a naked boy taking a bow, a frontal male nude with his arms folded, a tall woman who seems to be adding or removing some tiny thing to or from his crown, and a taller male immediately behind the chair, like an heir. At stage right are two nude women, one in a tub, the other on a white horse, along with a cluster of clowns in pointed hats.

Looking on at this scene from the darkness above, as if in a balcony, are ten large ghostlike heads, many with their eyes lowered or closed. More varied in size and style, roughly the same number of half-length figures are assembled in the theater’s orchestra. Their faces and bodies are scratched every which way with graphic abandon. Like the spectators in the famous modern life theater scenes by Honoré Daumier and Edgar Degas, Picasso’s spectators are his principal subject. Their attention is distracted by the close-up image of a man passionately kissing a woman, a favorite motif that Picasso introduced into his 1 Brigitte Baer, Picasso the Printmaker: Graphics from the Marina Picasso Collection, Dallas Museum of Art, 1983, p.192-196.

2 Picasso The Last Years, 1963-1973, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1983, p.59.

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ECCE HOMO, AFTER REMBRANDT b1865 | 1970 | Etching and aquatint | 267⁄8 × 22 inches

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work in the 1920s and had recently reprised in a series of 1969 paintings that he was about to exhibit for the first time in Avignon. Often the figures in this lower section of Ecce Homo are identified as people from Picasso’s past, starting at left with a small head of Dora Maar in profile, then to the right of her Françoise Gilot, and right of her a Cubist head, possibly to represent Fernande Olivier, and to her right a tiny head, perhaps MarieThérèse Walter. Juliet Roque Picasso is more recognizable at the far right as a nude model, from whose head emerges a larger nude with folded arms. [1] [2] The possible identifications of specific figures aside, Picasso’s theme here, both ambitious and nostalgic, is how “all the world’s a stage,” spectators no different from performers, fact no different from fiction. In terms of contemporary parallels, Picasso’s Ecce Homo is probably best compared with the films of Federico Fellini, like Juliet of the Spirits (1965), or Satyricon (1969), with their fantastical theatrical images of family, friends and historical characters psychologically interwoven as vaudeville.

1 Brigitte Baer, “Seven Years of Printmaking: The Theatre and its Limits” in Late Picasso, London, Tate Gallery, 1988, p.114-116.

2 Janie Cohen, “Picasso’s Dialogue with Rembrandt’s Art” in Etched on the Memory: The Presence of Rembrandt in the prints of Goya and Picasso, Amsterdam, 2000, p.106-111.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My ongoing fascination with Picasso was nurtured by conversations with Robert Rosenblum and Leo Steinberg, two of the mainstays of modern Picasso scholarship. More recently I had the good fortune to work closely with Picasso’s friend, Sir John Richardson, as he prepared the final fourth volume of his superlative biography of the artist. Thanks to him, I was invited to contribute an essay about the lithographs to the catalogue of Picasso and Françoise Gilot, Paris and Vallauris, 1943–1953, an exhibition presented in New York at the Gagosian Gallery in 2012. True to character, Sir John and his colleagues on the Gagosian research team, most especially Andres Hecker, helped in countless ways as I studied the prints in this current exhibition. For invaluable insights into the subtleties of Picasso’s techniques, I want to thank two Phildadelphia artists with a passion for the subject: my old friend, Bill Scott, and his friend, master printer, Cindi Ettinger.

— Charles Stuckey

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CONTRIBUTORS Charles Stuckey is a New York based independent scholar in charge of research for the forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné for paintings and gouaches by Yves Tanguy. He has worked closely with McClain Gallery for nearly a decade. A widely published specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century American and European art, he led a distinguished career as a curator at the National Gallery of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum. He helped organize major retrospective exhibitions on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eduoard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet; and he has published major articles and catalogue essays on Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp. In 1997 he was awarded a knighthood in the Légion d’honneur in recognition of his contributions.

Gary Tinterow returned to his native Houston in 2012 to become director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston where he coordinated the Picasso Black & White exhibition the same year. Tinterow is considered one of the foremost Picasso scholars of his generation. His contributions began with the exhibition Master Drawings by Picasso at the Fogg Art Museum in 1981. Working with the great Picasso collector Douglas Cooper, in 1983 Tinterow co-organized The Essential Cubism 1907–1920: Braque, Picasso & Their Friends presented at the Tate Gallery, London. The following year Tinterow became the curator for modern European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1992 he organized the Picasso clássico exhibition for Picasso’s hometown of Malaga. Most recently Tinterow was a co-organizer of two landmark exhibitions devoted to Picasso: Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-garde in 2006; and Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010. In 2003 he was awarded a knighthood in the Légion d’honneur and in 2012 he was promoted to Officer.

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