La Suite Vollard (complete set of 100 etchings)

A trade of paintings for copper plates

Ambroise Vollard was one of the most influential dealers of modern art. He championed Paul Cézanne, staged an early retrospective of Vincent van Gogh, showed Paul Gauguin's Tahitian paintings, and in 1901 gave a 19-year-old Pablo Picasso his first exhibition in Paris. He was also a passionate publisher of illustrated books, and it was through prints that his relationship with Picasso became most committed.

No contract survives for the suite that bears his name, which is not surprising given Vollard's known aversion to written agreements. The usual account is a swap: Picasso supplied etched plates and Vollard gave him paintings he wanted for his own collection. Published accounts name the paintings as works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. The Philadelphia Museum of Art dates the arrangement to 1931; other accounts put the commission in 1930.

The National Gallery of Australia argues the suite was never a specific commission at all, but a selection from Picasso's graphic output of the early 1930s that he probably exchanged with Vollard for works by other artists. The Philadelphia Museum of Art thinks the two men most likely chose the plates together, probably in 1937. Picasso gave the plates no titles and no fixed order. Nearly every plate carries the date it was made, which is why the standard catalogue by Georges Bloch arranges them chronologically, while the order proposed by historian Hans Bolliger, numbered SV 1 to SV 100, groups them by theme.

What Vollard intended to publish is still unclear. Later research suggests the etchings were meant to accompany two poems by André Suarès, Minotaure and Minos et Pasiphaë, as a book or album, but how the images and texts were to be combined was never recorded.

The sculptor, the model and the Minotaur

The plates track a turbulent stretch of Picasso's life. By the late 1920s he was living a respectable, bourgeois life with his wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and resenting it. In January 1927 he approached the 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter outside a Paris department store and told her he wanted to paint her. By 1930 she was living in a flat near his family home, and her classical profile dominates the suite.

The largest group, 46 plates usually called the Sculptor's Studio, shows a bearded sculptor, his model and his sculptures in calm neoclassical line. It grew out of two book projects running at the same time: Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, which Vollard commissioned, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, published by a rival. The two books appeared within 18 days of each other in October and November 1931.

In May 1933, the month Picasso designed the first cover of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, the bull-headed Minotaur entered the suite. He begins as a carousing lover, turns violent, and finally appears blind and helpless, led through the night by a girl with Marie-Thérèse's features. In the last of these plates Picasso flooded the copper with a velvet-black aquatint and scraped the figures out of the darkness.

Picasso learned new techniques as he went, working in the studio of Roger Lacourière, who recalled in 1961 that Picasso's presence made it a place of constant experiment. The four Rembrandt plates began in January 1932 when the varnish on a plate cracked and Picasso started scratching into it. "It became Rembrandt," he told his dealer. Some plates were made at a rate of three or four a day; most were finished in a single state, but a few, especially the erotic scenes, went through many, one through fourteen.

Printed on the eve of war

Vollard asked Lacourière to begin printing the edition in June 1936. The three portraits of Vollard, dated 1937, were added at the end and were originally intended for a separate publication. Printing was completed in 1939, and in July of that year Vollard was killed in a road accident, only weeks after the edition came off the press. His plans for the suite died with him.

The prints Picasso made in these years absorbed more than his private life. Critics have read the blind Minotaur as an image of the political darkness spreading over Europe with the rise of fascism. In July 1936 Franco's uprising began the Spanish Civil War; Picasso sided with the Republic, and in 1937, the year the suite was completed, he painted Guernica for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair.

Vollard's death left his house on the rue de Martignac full of unsold paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints. The collector and dealer Henri Marie Petiet, born in 1894, negotiated with the executors and, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, bought the edition. He received prints from only 97 of the plates: the three Vollard portraits had gone, deliberately or not, to a competitor, so Petiet had to deal with a rival whenever he wanted to sell a complete set.

Signed for cash, then broken up

Petiet faced a second problem. Before Vollard died, Picasso had signed only 15 impressions each of just ten of the plates. Unsigned prints were worth less, so Petiet persuaded Picasso to sign more, at a price: 100 francs per signature, later 200, paid in cash. Fearing the artist might stop at any time, Petiet brought him the large-margin sets first. The signing went on sporadically until 1969, when Picasso stopped. No record survives of how many sets or single sheets he signed.

The suite reached the market only in the 1950s. Many owners broke sets up and sold the prints one by one, which is why complete sets, and above all the large-margin ones, are rare. Museums bought them whole: the Philadelphia Museum of Art bought its first 97 sheets in 1950 and the three portraits of Vollard in 1969. The National Gallery of Australia acquired a set in 1984, and complete sets are also held by institutions including the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Gallery of Canada and Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

On November 5, 1971, at 5:10 in the afternoon, six men burst into a Madrid gallery showing 27 etchings from the suite, threw acid on the walls and the works, smashed them with sledgehammers and slashed them with knives. Sixteen were destroyed in five minutes. The far-right paramilitary group Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey claimed the attack in a manifesto denouncing Picasso.

In 2011 the financier Hamish Parker gave the British Museum the money, reported as £1 million and by CNN as $1.5 million, to buy a complete set in memory of his father, Major Horace Parker. The set came directly from Petiet's heirs and had never been shown in public. Its 2012 exhibition was described as the first showing of a complete set in a British public institution. In November 2017 another complete set from Petiet's stock sold at auction in Paris for 1.9 million euros to an American collector.

On November 11, 2019, a signed set from the 50-set large-margin edition, consigned by Petiet's heirs, sold at auction in New York for $4,815,000 against an estimate of $3 million to $5 million. The cataloguers said it was only the third signed deluxe set to appear at auction in forty years. It is reported as the auction record for any Picasso multiple.

How to know a complete set

A complete set is 100 sheets: the etchings, aquatints and drypoints catalogued as Bloch 134 to 233. Picasso's signature at lower right is the key to value, since much of the edition was printed unsigned and signed later, if at all. Each image carries the date it was made, inscribed in the plate.

Sources disagree on the edition. One account gives 250 sets on Montval paper watermarked "Vollard" or "Picasso," 50 on Montval paper watermarked "Papeterie Montgolfier à Montval," and three on parchment. Others describe 50 sets on large sheets and 260 on smaller ones, or some 310 sets plus three on vellum. The sheets of the large-margin set sold in 2019 measured about 50 x 38.5 cm (19 3/4 x 15 1/8 in.).

Provenance matters. The 2019 set and the British Museum's both trace directly from Vollard to Petiet and then to Petiet's heirs. Because the three Vollard portraits were sold separately from the other 97 plates, a set whose portraits came by a different route is common. Philadelphia's own set was assembled that way, in purchases 19 years apart.

The numbers

Medium

Etching, engraving, drypoint and aquatint on Montval laid paper; 100 sheets

Dimensions

Large-margin sheets about 50 x 38.5 cm (19 3/4 x 15 1/8 in.); plate sizes vary

Catalogue raisonné

Bloch 134-233; thematic order SV 1-100 after Hans Bolliger

Public collections

Complete sets at the British Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Australia, Bibliothèque nationale de France, National Gallery of Canada and others

2019 record set

Buyer not disclosed

Timeline

1. 1901

   Ambroise Vollard gives the 19-year-old Picasso his first Paris exhibition.

2. Jan 1927

   Picasso meets Marie-Thérèse Walter outside a Paris department store; she becomes the model of the suite.

3. Sep 1930

   Picasso etches the earliest plates that will form the suite.

4. 1931

   The Balzac and Ovid books Picasso illustrated are published within 18 days of each other, in October and November.

5. Jan 1932

   A cracked varnish ground on one plate turns into the first of four Rembrandt subjects.

6. May 1933

   The Minotaur first appears in the suite, the same month Picasso designs the cover of Minotaure.

7. Jun 1936

   Vollard asks master printer Roger Lacourière to begin printing the edition.

8. 1937

   Three portraits of Vollard are etched and added to complete the hundred.

9. Jul 1939

   Vollard is killed in a road accident, weeks after Lacourière finishes printing.

10. 1950

    The Philadelphia Museum of Art buys 97 sheets; it adds the three portraits of Vollard in 1969.

11. 1969

    Picasso stops signing impressions for Petiet.

12. Nov 5, 1971

    A far-right group attacks a Madrid exhibition of 27 etchings from the suite, destroying sixteen.

13. 1984

    The National Gallery of Australia acquires a complete set and shows it from October 27 to December 9.

14. Nov 2011

    Hamish Parker funds the British Museum's purchase of a complete set from Petiet's heirs.

15. May 3, 2012

    The British Museum opens its exhibition of the complete suite, on view until September 2.

16. Nov 2017

    A complete set from Petiet's stock sells at auction in Paris for 1.9 million euros.

17. Nov 11, 2019

    A signed large-margin set from Petiet's heirs sells at auction in New York for $4,815,000.

The world in 1924

• 1924

  The Surrealist manifesto is published; its distortions give Picasso a new language in the late 1920s.

• 1931

  Picasso's illustrated editions of Balzac and Ovid appear within weeks of each other in Paris.

• May 1933

  The Surrealist magazine Minotaure launches with a cover by Picasso.

• Oct 1935

  Marie-Thérèse Walter gives birth to Picasso's daughter Maia.

• Jul 18, 1936

  Franco's uprising against the Spanish Republic begins the Spanish Civil War.

• Apr 1937

  German aircraft supporting Franco bomb the Basque town of Guernica.

• 1937

  Picasso's Guernica hangs in the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair.

• 1939

  World War II breaks out, delaying distribution of the suite until the 1950s.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, La Suite Vollard (complete set of 100 etchings) is number 22 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (22 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Picasso charged 100 francs, later 200, in cash for each signature the dealer Henri Petiet asked him to add.
• When Vollard died, Picasso had signed only 15 impressions each of just ten of the hundred plates.
• The four Rembrandt plates began by accident, when the varnish on one of Picasso's plates cracked and he started scratching into it.
• Some plates were made at a rate of three or four a day; one went through fourteen states.
• The three portraits of Vollard were separated from the other 97 plates after his death, so dealers had to reunite them to sell a complete set.
• In 1971 a far-right group destroyed sixteen prints from the suite in a five-minute attack on a Madrid gallery.
• Picasso gave the hundred plates no titles and no order; the familiar groupings were added by others.