Picasso

Picasso made over 2000 prints in every imaginable technique during his long career, but the intaglio process used for the Vollard Suite is the one to which he remained most faithful.

An Italian word which means 'to incise', intaglio entails either cutting directly into metal with drypoint or engraving tools, or drawing with a needle to remove a protective ground so that an incision, which prints as a line, can be etched away when the metal plate is immersed in acid. Engraving removes a thread of metal from the plate by force whereas etching allows the artist to draw effortlessly and cursively, as with a pencil. Aquatint can be added to these linear techniques and involves pitting the plate with tiny indentations so that a tonal area is produced.

Picasso took an unhierarchic view of media, working in every kind of material with equal enthusiasm and making some of his most important statements in prints and drawings. Some of the Vollard Suite plates were created at the rate of three or four a day, for graphic art is particularly suited to sequences of images, whose meaning derives from their interrelationship.

Although Picasso himself provided no sub-titles the Suite has been divided as follows: twenty-seven miscellaneous plates, many of which fit into other sequences; five scenes of rate, sometimes euphemistically called The battle of love; four plates in which Picasso measures himself against the genius of Rembrandt; a long unbroken sequence of 1933 in The sculptor’s studio which merges into the scenes in which the Minotaur unleashes his passions; and four plates that depict the Blind minotaur doing penance for the disorder he has caused. The order suggested by historian Hans Bolliger² follows these themes and is referred to in the checklist by SV numbers, whereas in the catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s graphic work, Georges Bloch arranges the prints in date order,³ for nearly every case Picasso wrote the date and place of making on the plate as part of the image.

Picasso’s brilliance as a graphic artist can be seen in the way he utilizes the great variety of intaglio techniques to reinforce meaning. The sculptor in his studio – heroic, dignified, gentle and introspective – is drawn with the exquisite refinement of an etched neoclassical line, finer, crisper and more elegantly lucid than can be achieved by pen. When the mood changes to one of carnal passion the artist employs the forceful and astringent cut of the burin, the drypoint furrow to trap extra ink to bleed into the paper, or a deliberately murky aquatint to mottle the battling figures. In scenes of sleepers and wakers - a recurrent leitmotif in Picasso's work— aquatint shadows, or films of ink manipulated like veils, evoke appropriate mystery.

Printers were continually amazed when Picasso's disregard for time-honoured rules bore fruit. In 1961 Lacourière recalled that from the moment Picasso frequented his atelier it became a place 'of enthusiasm, of constant experiment, and of discoveries in the technique never known before.' The artist's power of improvisation can be seen in the Rembrandt subjects which emerged in the Vollard Suite in January 1932, when the varnish on one of his plates cracked and he began to scratch on it. As he told his dealer on 6 February of that year:

'It became Rembrandt. This began to amuse me and I continued with it. I even followed it up with another one, complete with his turban, his fur coats, and his eye, that elephant eye of his, you know. I am now working on this plate to achieve the same blacks as he did; that's something that cannot be done at the first go.'⁴

Rich tissues of cross-hatching in the Suite serve not only to point the difference between a Rembrandtian subject and Picasso's own spare line, but to detail parts of some figures so that they appear to take on a greater degree of reality, a strategy that sometimes suggests that the sculptor's statue, as in the Pygmalion legend, is coming to life.

Perhaps the most beautiful intaglio device that Picasso uses to reinforce meaning is in the last of the four Blind minotaur subjects: Blind minotaur led through the night by a little girl. To an artist, whose business is vision, blindness must seem the worst of all possible fates and Picasso plunges the whole plate into blackness with a velvet aquatint, out of which the poignant figures have been scraped to illuminate the darkness.

Picasso's lifelong friend, Jaime Sabartés, confirmed that if we could reconstruct Picasso’s itinerary, step by step, 'we would discover in his works the record of his spiritual vicissitudes, the blows of fate, the satisfaction and annoyances, joys and delights, the pains suffered on a certain day or at a certain time of a given year’.⁵

Picasso himself told the photographer Brassaï⁶ that he dated every work precisely because it was necessary to know when, why and how an artist made his works so as to leave to posterity as complete a documentation as possible for the study of creative man.

Acting on both these leads, Mary Mathews Gedo subtitled her psychological study of the artist Art as autobiography.⁷ She put together the separately catalogued paintings and drawings,⁸ sculptures,⁹ and graphic works,¹⁰ as well as 500 paintings that Picasso had retained unseen in his private collection,¹¹ so that the way the artist's output functioned as a day-to-day dairy became increasingly clear.

The facts of his life during the period in which the Vollard Suite was created centre on Picasso's increasing dissatisfaction with his marriage. His wife, Olga Koklova, was a minor Russian dancer whom Picasso met in 1917 when he was designing for the Diaghilev Company in Rome. As the twenties proceeded Picasso found himself increasingly dominated by the conventions of Olga's bourgeois household.

The distortions of Surrealism, the manifesto of which was published in 1924, presented him with a timely means of expressing his frustration.

In January 1927 the artist picked up Marie-Thérèse Walter outside a Paris department store, told her he wanted to paint her unusual profile and that he sensed that they 'would do great things together'. Picasso's name meant nothing to her, but she was mesmerized by his red and black tie.

By 1930, Marie-Thérèse, described by critic John Berger as 'the sexually most important affair of Picasso's life',¹² was installed in a flat near his matrimonial home; unknown to his wife he frequently billeted her nearby during his regular family vacations. The tension of these summers is recorded in grotesque bathers cavorting on French beaches from Cannes to Dinard.

Art historians have consistently and inaccurately misdated the beginning of the liaison with Marie-Thérèse to 1932, but the Gallery owns a beautiful lithographic close-up of her classic three-quarter profile called Visage (Face), made in 1928. Although there were many women in Picasso's life, Marie-Thérèse dominates his work more than any of the others. In a sense he created a classic ideal and then fell in love with it. In the early thirties her erotic curves, suggesting both fertility goddesses and compliant nymphs, appear in countless paintings and drawings, in an important series of sculpted heads and, of course, in the Vollard Suite, where the rival claims of lovemaking and artmaking are weighed against each other.

Olga had by this time become a nagging harridan and in some images retained in the Suite, for example a stabbing scene related to David's famous painting The death of Marat and one of Marie-Thérèse swimming, tenuously connected with other works in which she is saved from drowning, there is a hint of Picasso's anxiety for the safety of his mistress, who was thirty years his junior.

After following the Spanish bullfights during the summers of 1933 and 1934 Picasso revived the earlier erotic imagery they had inspired, this time deploying frenetic expressionist distortions to make explicit the drama of the eternal triangle in which he figured.

In late 1934 or early 1935 Marie-Thérèse conceived a child, which Picasso now had to confess to his wife and on 12 July, their seventeenth wedding anniversary, Olga and Picasso's firstborn, Paulo, moved out of the matrimonial home. Unpleasant squabbles about property and legal separation ensued in a period Picasso later described as 'the worst time of my life'. The Vollard Suite scenes of late 1934 depicting the Minotaur, first killed in the arena and now blind, display remorse on Picasso's part, not least, perhaps, because he found his ardour for Marie-Thérèse already cooling.

Marie-Thérèse, described by Roland Penrose as the only 'truly non-intelligent' and 'really vulgar' woman in Picasso's life, bore his daughter Maia in October 1935. Although the artist did not completely sever ties with her for many years, by the time Maia was born he was already window-shopping for her successor, photographer Dora Maar. By 1936, the blonde Marie-Thérèse had been superseded and Picasso now had the brunette Dora in his thrall; for the Minotaur, like the bull of the Spanish corrida, is born to fight again no matter how often vanquished.

The aesthetic breakthrough for which Picasso is famous is Cubism (1907–14), the movement in which modem painting broke radically with tradition. However, in Rome between the wars Picasso came face-to-face with great Renaissance painters such as Raphael and succumbed to the influence of various antique models — Greek vases, Etruscan mirror engravings and Hellenistic sculptures, as well as the classical tradition as revived by Ingres in the nineteenth century.

The classical profile of Marie-Thérèse informs the most extensive run of prints in the Vollard Suite, The sculptor's studio in which Picasso explores every facet of the activity of a classical sculptor, sometimes watched by a huge Zeus head representing academic tradition. Picasso, of course, changed his style like his shirt and Surrealism suggested to him an incredible range of biomorphic distortions that could be practised on the human figure. From time to time, therefore, the sculptors Apollonian calm is disturbed by Dionysian subjects such as an Athenian youth bearing wine and a dagger tangled groups of animals, and bacchanalian revellers; in one instance, the human body has even been metamorphosed into a junk sculpture of assorted hold objects.

Giving a running commentary on the Vollard plates to Françoise Gilot, his mistress of the forties and fifties, Picasso told her:

'The sculptor’s a little mixed up ... he's not sure which way he wants to work. Of course, if you note all the different shapes, sizes and colours of the models he works from, you can understand his confusion. He doesn't know what he wants. No wonder his style is ambiguous. It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying things from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he ends up lying around and caressing his models.'¹³

The earliest plates Picasso made for the Vollard Suite run concurrently with two important books etched in the classical style, Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu by Balzac and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Vollard commissioned the first of these, the title of which translates as The unknown masterpiece, in 1926. The story relates how Poussin and a friend visited a painter called Frenhofer who, in the quest for lifelike perfection, has made a meaningless jumble of lines of the portrait of a model he loves. Picasso did not stick very closely to the story, but used it as a springboard for the consideration of such problems as style, reality versus illusion, and the relationship of the artist and the model. Picasso not only featured a painter but a sculptor too, for he had recently become interested again in three-dimensional work and a new country property at Boisgeloup forty miles north-west of Paris provided the necessary space.

In 1931–32 Picasso made several larger-than-life sculpted heads of Marie-Thérèse in which her features are systematically decomposed, as in tribal masks, so as to operate as a series of sexual metaphors. These heads appear in the Vollard Suite many times. During most of the activity in the studio the intellectual sculptor is intent on his work, but from time to time his animal nature comes to the surface and he breaks off to indulge in 'battles of love'. Eventually, through the myth of the Minotaur, at first a loveable rogue but ultimately more and more ruthless, Picasso explores 'the movable frontier between sexual urgency and violence, compliance and victimization, pleasure and pain', as life gets in the way of art.

The bull has frequently featured in European legend. Zeus assumed the form of a bull when he wanted to abduct and rape Europa. Poseidon gave a white bull to King Minos of Crete so that his wife, Pasiphaë, would fall hopelessly in love with it. Their union resulted in the Minotaur, who had the head of a bull on the body of a man and was fed with an annual tribute of human flesh.

During the thirties such legends were reinterpreted in the light of Freudian psychology and the Surrealists, who saw the Minotaur in the labyrinth as irrational impulse at the centre of the mind, named one of their magazines after it. Picasso made the first cover for Minotaure in May 1933 and at this time the mythical bull-man first emerged in the Vollard Suite.

The Cretan legends, together with the cult of Mithras involving bull sacrifice, are connected with the bullfight and Picasso may also have known that the Greeks sacrificed bulls to Poseidon, who was thought to cause earthquakes. Gedo relates that the birth of Picasso's sister took place during an earthquake in Málaga in 1884 and soon afterwards Picasso's father began taking his small son to the Spanish corrida. So Picasso may have made a literal connection between bull sacrifice and earth-shattering events.

In the first part of the bullfight the bull is encouraged to gore the horse and lift it on his horns, while the picador astride the horse takes the opportunity to lance the bull in the neck. It is a strategy which tires the bull, causing him to lower his head so the matador on foot can later kill him with a sword. In Picasso's youth, when horses were not padded as they are today, the horse was frequently disembowelled and trailed its viscera around the arena 'in complete burlesque of tragedy’. Hemingway explains in his famous book about the bullfight¹⁴ that, to a Spaniard, the death of the horse is a mere incidental, almost a comic relief. Normally a Spaniard concentrates on the tragic death ritual enacted between the bull and the man and is not interested in the savage fate that befalls the picador’s horse, although this has always exercised the imagination of appalled tourists. Yet aficionado though he was, it was the encounter between the horse and the bull that Picasso depicted more than any other aspect of the bullfight.

It was in his first years with Olga that Picasso started drawing horses and bulls with erotic overtones. At first the two animals gambol and play, but the horn increasingly buries itself in the horse’s belly; Roland Penrose was not alone in seeing in such drawings a complex sexual symbolism.¹⁵ By chance one of these earlier drawings, converted into an etching, found its way into Vollard’s Balzac book. It had nothing to do with the story, in fact it was actually made for a projected Tauromachy, but according to Bernhard Geiser,¹⁶ Vollard resorted to this random plate when he was trying to race his rival, Albert Skira, who was publishing the Ovid volume. These two important Picasso books came out within eighteen days of each other in October-November 1931.

There is conclusive evidence that Picasso regarded the bull as himself, or the male principle, and the horse as the most important woman in his life, or the female principle. For example in 1954, when he was splitting up with Françoise Gilot, one of the few women to survive the encounter relatively whole, he told her he wanted her to ‘leave with the honours of war’ and arranged for her to ride out on horseback at the grand opening of a bullfight held for him at Vallauris. ‘For me’, he told her, ‘the bull is the proudest symbol of all, and your symbol is the horse. I want our two symbols to face each others in that ritual way.’ Although on balance the former is active and the latter passive, in keeping with conventional sexual stereotypes, through the imagery of the picador, both animals are capable of interpretation either as destroyer or as sacrificial victim.

While the Minotaur embodies one aspect of destructive sexuality as it affected Marie-Thérèse and the beast does penance for it, the complete saga of martial emotions is enacted through the corrida, with Picasso’s lover either a gentle spectator or a female matador tossed onto the bull’s damaging horns.

Kahnweiler, Picasso's dealer, said that the artist was the most apolitical man he had ever known, but that the Franco uprising ‘wrenched him out of this quietude and made him a defender of peace and liberty'. Another factor was Picasso's friendship with the poet Paul Eluard, a Communist who believed that artists should be politically engaged. When the Civil War broke out, Picasso, a Spanish exile living in France, sided with the Republicans, who appointed him Director of the Prado, the great art gallery in Madrid.

In 1937, in response to various war atrocities, Picasso made a two-sheet etched comic strip, Sueño y mentira de Franco (The dream and lie of Franco), to raise money for the Republican cause. It was accompanied by a violent Surreal text of the kind the artist had written during the darkest days of 1935, when his affairs were in such disorder that he almost gave up painting. In fourteen of the eighteen sections into which the two sheets are divided, Franco, a Surreal root-like polyp illtreating his mount, is seen attacking art, leading his army and blaspheming in church, until, collapsing in the shape of a mutant horse, he is subdued by a noble bull.

Picasso had not finished this comic strip when in April 1937 Germans supporting Franco bombed a small town without military importance but sacred to the Basques, killing hundreds of people. Guernica was the first place bombed to intimidate a civilian population, a practice that became commonplace in the following world war and culminated in Hiroshima, attacked according to the same calculation.

In protest, Picasso made his huge painting, Guernica, for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair, and in June, the month in which it was hung, he added four final scenes to his comic strip. These must be read from right to left, because the sheet reverses in printing. The scenes depict the quiescent Marie-Thérèse with child, the weeping Dora Maar, and two panic-stricken groups from Guernica, which was to become one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century. Together these scenes reveal that Picasso's own love affairs lay behind his profound emotion.

The symbolism of Picasso's masterpiece, in which the horse and bull are important protagonists, has been subject to endless analyses. The bull has been equated, somewhat simplistically, with the brutality and darkness of Fascism, or more subtly with the exiled artist on the sidelines, surveying the horse which represents the victimized people. It has also been related to the earlier great etching of 1935, the Minotauromachy. This in turn drew on the Vollard Suite plates where the blind Minotaur, representing the unbridled forces of the Freudian id, is led by a gentle Marie-Thérèse figure bearing flowers or a dove, and encouraging a moral interpretation in terms of light and darkness, good and evil. Berger convincingly suggests, however, that the roots of Guernica were largely biologically determined and that to express these feelings Picasso hardly needed to leave his own body. For the vocabulary he developed in the thirties, seen in the Vollard Suite, a vocabulary he had used to express purely personal emotion, needed little adaptation to fit it for a powerful public statement about pain and suffering.

Pat Gilmour