Le Viol (Vollard Suite)

YEAR: 1931

SIZE
Unframed: 8 3/4×12 1/4 in, full margins
Framed: 27 x 31.5 in, full margins

MEDIUM/MATERIALS Etching on Montval laid paper

CATALOGUES: Bloch 142; Geiser 209

Edition of 260
Signed in pencil, lower right. Picasso watermark.
Printed by Lacourière, Paris. Published by Vollard, Paris.
A very good impression.

This Picasso etching is such a strong image of two figures. The figures’ defining lines are so solid and then the shading that Picasso achieved with the crosshatching, reminiscent of Rembrandt. This etching is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The Vollard Suite, the most significant cycle of prints made by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), was commissioned by Ambroise Vollard, a leading art dealer in Paris. Begun in 1930 and completed in 1937, this series of one hundred etchings explores the artist’s studio as a creative space and provides an intimate look into the mind of Picasso.

Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) was one of Picasso’s earliest champions. The first dealer to exhibit the artist’s work, Vollard bought his first Picasso painting in 1906 and eventually assembled a renowned collection of the artist’s works. During the 1920s he began publishing Picasso’s prints. The formal details of the Vollard Suite commission are not fully known, however. Its earliest etching dates from September 1930, but most of its works were made in 1933 and 1934. It seems the series developed organically: Picasso and Vollard made a selection from a larger group of etchings the artist had made for possible inclusion in the suite. Richard Lacouiènre was hired to print the etchings in 1939, but the unexpected death of Vollard that year and the outbreak of World War II prevented the sets from being published.

Exemplifying the neoclassical style that emerged from his study of Classical sculpture, the series shows Picasso employing an array of references from mythology and the history of art to examine the mysteries of the artist’s creative powers. Set primarily in the artist’s studio, Picasso eroticizes the relationship between the artist, model, and art in the series, casting himself in the role of the sculptor pictured throughout. The suite shifts from works of serene contemplation of beauty drawn with a graceful, simple line to images of aggression, animalistic desire, and torment that are aggressively etched and heavily worked. An unresolved drama between tranquility and agony, power and impotence, classical harmony and the irrational forces of the human psyche, plays itself out in the series.