Pablo Picasso - Editions & Works on Paper New York Friday, July 24, 2020 | Phillips

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 23 - 24 July 2020

  • Provenance

    Ambroise Vollard, Paris
    Henri M. Petiet, Paris (from the estate above)
    Heirs of Henri M. Petiet, Paris
    Marc Rosen Fine Art, New York
    Private Collection, New England, acquired from the above in 2011

  • Literature

    Georges Bloch 219
    Brigitte Baer 424

  • Catalogue Essay

    "The so-called Vollard Suite, one hundred etchings made from 1930 to 1937, are the most psychologically and formally complex of all Picasso's treatments of antiquity, augmented by his 1930 illustrations for Ovid's Metamorphoses and those of 1934 for Aristophanes's Lysistrata. All these prints have a freshness and invention lacking in most of Picasso's earlier images of this general type, as if his deep classicizing impulses had been stifled by his involvement with circles that failed to appreciate the full irony of his dalliance with academic art. Once the artist was back in the company of the avant-garde, the pall that hung over his renditions of the Greco-Roman ideal evaporated, and what remained was a wondrously discursive evocation of a Golden Age of heroes and goddesses, satyrs and Minotaurs, bacchanalia and sexual paradise. Yet the Vollard Suite and related drawings and prints were as anti-avant-garde as their immediate antecedents. As always, Picasso brushed aside notions of stylistic progress in favor of stylistic simultaneity at its most pronounced." Robert Storr, Modern Art despite Modernism, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2000, p. 48

  • Artist Biography

    Pablo Picasso

    Spanish • 1881 - 1973

    One of the most dominant and influential artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was a master of endless reinvention. While significantly contributing to the movements of Surrealism, Neoclassicism and Expressionism, he is best known for pioneering the groundbreaking movement of Cubism alongside fellow artist Georges Braque in the 1910s. In his practice, he drew on African and Iberian visual culture as well as the developments in the fast-changing world around him.

    Throughout his long and prolific career, the Spanish-born artist consistently pushed the boundaries of art to new extremes. Picasso's oeuvre is famously characterized by a radical diversity of styles, ranging from his early forays in Cubism to his Classical Period and his later more gestural expressionist work, and a diverse array of media including printmaking, drawing, ceramics and sculpture as well as theater sets and costumes designs. 

    View More Works

2

Pablo Picasso

Quatre femmes nues et tête sculptée (Four Nude Women and a Carved Head), plate 82, from La Suite Vollard

1934
Etching, on Montval laid paper watermark Vollard, with full margins.
I. 8 3/4 x 12 3/8 in. (22.2 x 31.4 cm)
S. 13 1/4 x 17 5/8 in. (33.7 x 44.8 cm)
Signed in pencil, from the edition of 260 (there was also an edition of 50 with wide margins), numbered '347' in the Henri Petiet inventory system lower left corner, published by Ambroise Vollard, Paris, 1939, framed.

Estimate
$25,000 - 35,000 

Contact Specialist
Kelly Troester
Worldwide Co-Head of Editions, Modern
+1 212 940 1221
ktroester@phillips.com

Cary Leibowitz
Worldwide Co-Head of Editions, Contemporary
1 212 940 1222
cleibowitz@phillips.com

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 23 - 24 July 2020