As the date for the eagerly-awaited Picasso and Miró: The Flesh and The Spirit exhibition draws closer, Sarah Chircop explores one particular facet of the works on show – Picasso’s The Vollard Suite.

It is the turn of the century –  June 24, 1901 – to be precise, and Pablo Picasso has his very first major exhibition in Paris.

Picasso, an outsider at the tender age of 19, exhibits a series of paintings alongside fellow Spanish painter Francisco Iturrino and although the exhibition is a milestone event in the young artist’s life, the year 1901 is also to mark the beginning of Picasso’s collaboration and friendship with Ambroise Vollard, the man who staged this very exhibition at his gallery on the famous Rue Laffitte.

Like Picasso, Vollard (1866-1939) was once also an outsider to the metropolitan city but had since established himself as one of Paris’s leading avant-garde art dealers and print publishers. With this status, however, came a great deal of vanity and egoism as nearly every artist Vollard supported and dealt with was asked to produce his portrait, sometimes on more than one occasion.

Portrait de Vollard I (Portrait of Vollard 1).

Picasso’s relationship with Vollard is described to have been somewhat less fraught, even though not always consistent, and yet the artist would go on to produce one of the greatest artworks of the 20th century, a volume of work possessing the man’s very name – The Vollard Suite.

The Vollard Suite is a series of etchings commissioned by Vollard and produced between 1930 and 1937. The body of work offers an ongoing change and metamorphosis that eludes any final resolution. Even though most of its themes, or obsessions if you will, had already appeared in Picasso’s work, on returning to them the artist transformed them and imbued them with richer meaning.

The 100 prints have no particular chronological order but explore a variety of themes that can be read as narrative cores –  from classicism to eroticism, the sculptor and his studio, his passionate affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter to his deep obsession with the minotaur and, finally, Picasso even manages an homage to the master-etcher Rembrandt van Rijn. Throughout all this, however, there is an underlying sense of the artist and his relationship with himself, with his art and with love, for in his own words: “It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.”

Throughout the Suite, he very loosely interprets the myth of the minotaur

On his exploration of classicism, reminiscing the serenity of Ingres, Picasso returns to order and monumentality which he then contrasts with disfiguration and a destruction of form while, on his contemplation with the model in the theme of The Sculptor’s Studio, he abandons the condition of voyeurism and simply looks at the work, the sculpture.

Despite the distance between the model, who is always his beloved Marie-Thérèse, there is a certain dormant eroticism, a sensuality that becomes more and more explicit and violent in the prints dedicated to The Battle of Love and in some dedicated to the Minotaur. The theme of the Minotaur first appeared in Picasso’s work in 1927  and since then had gone on to depict the man-beast repetitively and via different artistic media.

Throughout the Suite, he very loosely interprets the myth of the minotaur, providing a new interpretation for he was fascinated with his “human, all too human” side. The sculptor becomes the minotaur and the classical serenity is replaced by the emotion, the passion and conflicting feelings, the violence that we all share deep within us.

Finally, in The Blind Minotaur we see how if the man-animal is the painter himself, there can be no greater death for an artist than to go blind.

The Vollard Suite can be described as an allegory of the relationship between the artist and himself, where the conflict of creation must be resolved. And all of this is expressed through the etching medium. An etching is a printmaking technique that uses acid as its biting process. The most important challenge for the artist-etcher is to intelligently select and space his lines to build his subject while filling each and every line with life and expression. The foundation of a great etching lies in this free expression of the artist’s ideas and impressions and these ideas and impressions should be expressed using the most vital and fewest of lines.

The Vollard Suite illustrates Picasso’s deep understanding of the purity of line as well as its expressivity in various forms, and his contributions ensured a place for the etching medium throughout 20th century modernism.

Minotaure, une Coupe à la Main, et Jeune Femme (Drinking Minotaur and Reclining Woman)

In 2008, Fundación Mapfre purchased Picasso’s Vollard Suite and next year, through a collaboration with Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti and The Office of the President Malta, the entire Suite together with a selection of paintings by Joan Miró, will be brought to Malta for a first ever major exhibition titled Picasso and Miró: The Flesh and The Spirit.

The exhibition forms part of the international project Picasso-Méditerranée, an initiative from the Musée Picasso in Paris focused on Picasso’s relationship with the Mediterranean and featuring the participation of 60 museums between 2017 and 2019.

Picasso and Miró: The Flesh and The Spirit is a unique opportunity to explore and experience the exciting labyrinth of The Vollard Suite, side by side with paintings by another Spanish master of the 20th century.

The exhibition will run between April 7 and June 30, 2018, at The Palace in Valletta.