Reception: Friday, June 10, 5:30 – 7:30pm
LewAllen Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Pablo Picasso: Selections from La Suite Vollard, on view at the gallery’s Railyard venue from June 10 – July 24, 2011. This rigorously curated presentation of twenty-three original etchings and aquatints by one of Modernism’s greatest agitators draws predominantly from the celebrated La Suite Vollard—a salient element of Picasso’s (1881-1973) artistic achievement that is now recognized as one of the finest groups of prints produced in the 20th century.
The history of the suite revolves around several key figures in the history of Modern Art. The body of work takes its name from its publisher, Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), perhaps the most influential Parisian dealer and critic of his time, who had already championed the art of Cézanne, Maillol, Gauguin, Renoir, Roualt, and Van Gogh prior to organizing Picasso’s inaugural Parisian exhibition in 1901. When Picasso had sought to purchase from Vollard several paintings by Renoir—an artist whom Vollard represented and regarding whom he had published a significant monograph—the dealer had suggested an exchange of these works for one hundred original prints by Picasso. Faithful to his agreement, the artist produced the resulting suite between between 1930 and 1937 and had personally edited its selection to appeal to Vollard's forward-looking sensibilities.
By the end of World War I, Picasso’s art had evolved through his Blue, Rose, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism periods. He had pursued Cubism to its limits and was searching to define a novel artistic direction. In 1917, Picasso accompanied Jean Cocteau to Rome to design scenery and costumes for the ballet Parade, bringing him into focused contact with the classical forms that would inspire and revivify his practice. Rooted in this experience, he developed a new style in which he synthesized his revolutionary past achievements with an over neoclassicism, culminating in the Suite Vollard.
A considerable undertaking even for an artist of Picasso’s technical and creative capacities, the artist devided the Suite Vollard divided into principal five themes: Battle of Love; Sculptor’s Studio; Rembrandt; The Minotaur; and The Blind Minotaur, as well as a further twenty-seven prints of disparate themes. Twenty of the works on view in the present exhibition represent the Sculptor’s Studio theme within the suite. They explore the relationship between artist, model, sculpture, and the act of creation itself—offering rare insights into the working process of an often inscrutable artist.
In the Sculptor’s Studio series, Picasso presents images that depict artists and models considering sculptures, thus generating art from pictures of its spectatorship. By directly addressing the act of viewing and placing his audience’s perspective within the studio, the artist transcends the prevailing segregation of the audience from the active development of art’s meanings. Migrating the seemingly fixed forms of antiquity into the context of Modernism’s conceptual and aesthetic prerogatives, Picasso’s canny co-option of Neoclassicism exalted the lived experience of its audience no less than it heroized the sculpted figures depicted. That Picasso executed most of this democratically-spirited series between 1933 and 1934 speaks to his acute sensitivity to the ominous political climate in Europe prefiguring the single most powerful expression of modernity’s struggle against the horrors of war: Guernica (1937).
Accompanying the work from the Suite Vollard are three works presented here upon one of the rare occasions that they have been available for public exhibition. The etching Baigneuses sur la Plage III consists of a positive and negative impression—the former an edition of twelve and the latter of only four. En la Taberna. Pecheurs Catalans en bordée is from a special edition of 108, half of which are printed in a highly unusuaul brown-black coloration. The richly modulated aquatint Venus et l’amour, d’apres Cranach represents one of fifteen artist proofs; its medium manifests one of printmaking’s most complex, sensitive, and time-consuming procedures—producing very few high-quality impressions with the exquisite tonal effects easily perceived in the example on view. As proofs and products of experimentation, these images join the Sculptor’s Studio series to provide additional insight into Picasso’s sensibilities and techniques.
Prized by contemporary curators, selections from the Suite Vollard have been exhibited within several of the world’s most esteemed public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Norton Simon Museum.
For additional information and images, please contact Alex Ross by phone at (505) 988-3250 or via email at [email protected].
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