Picasso and the Vollard Suite National Gallery of Canada 1971 Exhibition Catalogue

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Picasso and the Vollard Suite National Gallery of Canada 1971 Exhibition Rare

Picasso: And the Vollard Suite
Author: Jean Sutherland … Read more Picasso and the Vollard Suite National Gallery of Canada 1971 Exhibition Rare

Picasso: And the Vollard Suite
Author: Jean Sutherland Boggs
Contributor: National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa)
Publisher: National Gallery of Canada, 1971

Picasso and the Vollard Suite was a 1971 publication by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa, Ontario. The publication was written by Jean Sutherland Boggs and featured Pablo Picasso's Vollard sample Suite of prints. This exhibition catalogue was written exclusively for this exhibit in 1971.

Explanation
Picasso and the Vollard Suite was a publication that accompanied an exhibition of Picasso's Vollard Suite of prints at the NGC in Ottawa. The suite is a collection of 100 etchings and drypoints that are considered a masterwork of Picasso's printmaking. The suite explores the relationship between man and beast, and the tension between tranquility and agony. 
About the Vollard Suite 
* The suite was created between 1930 and 1934.
* The suite was originally intended to be published in 1939, but was delayed due to the death of Vollard and the start of World War II.
* The suite was intended to be a selection of etchings from a larger group of works.
* The suite was intended to explore the mysteries of Picasso's creative powers.
From within the book:
This group of etchings is called the Vollard Suite after the dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939), who commissioned it from Picasso about 1930 as he had commissioned prints from many artists, including Picasso, in the past. The one hundred etched copper-plates were in Vollard's hands by 1937 but he was not able to have them printed before his death. The edition of 303 sets was nevertheless produced according to his specifications on the paper he preferred by a printer, Roger Lacourière, with whom Vollard had worked, and was put on sale in 1950.' The National Gallery's set is one of the group printed on paper watermarked "Picasso." Vollard met the twenty-year old Picasso in 1901 and gave him an exhibition with another Spanish artist that year. He bought his early works enthusiastically but became estranged as Picasso's work developed into cubism, even though one of the artist's finest cubist works is his 1910 portrait of the dealer. Nevertheless, Vollard continued to encourage him as a print-maker and in 1931 published Picasso's etchings for Balzac's novel, Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu.
Picasso was almost forty when he made the first plates for the Vollard Suite. He had been married thirteen years and had a son of nine.
Suddenly about 1931 he seemed to have felt himself liberated in taking a beautiful, un-demanding mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and, with her as his inspiration, produced some of his most happily erotic paintings. He turned to sculpture and modelled great plaster heads of Marie-Thérèse at a chateau he had bought at Boisgeloup, about forty-five miles northwest of Paris; these appear in some of his etchings (plate 2). The Vollard Suite gave him another opportunity to reveal his voluptuous consciousness of his senses.

The many quotations from Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Copyright © 1964 by
McGraw-Hill, Inc., have been used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book
Company.
© Reproduction rights for Vollard Suite etchings by SPADEM, Paris
Editors:
English text
Viviane Appleton
French text
Pierrette Vachon-L'Heureux
Photographs
Alice Armstrong
Publications production
Arnold Witty
Design
Frank Newfeld
Printing
Clarke Lithographing Ltd.
Published by the
National Gallery of
Canada for the
Corporation of the
National Museums
of Canada
Ottawa 1971

Measurements are 8.6” H x 8” W x .15” D. See less