Imagining Backwards: Seven Decades of Picasso Master Prints

McClain Gallery presents Imagining Backwards: Seven Decades of Picasso Master Prints on view September 13-October 29.

This exhibition of 50+ works will provide a succinct overview of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century with works dating from 1905 to 1970. The 1920’s and 1930’s, and in particular the iconic Vollard Suite (1930-1937), will be emphasized. The exhibition will explore Picasso’s oeuvre of printmaking techniques while providing a full survey of his most well-known muses.

The gallery is opening the exhibition the second week of September to coincide with Picasso: The Line, an exhibition organized by the Menil Drawing Institute. It is our hope that this project will contribute to the active dialog about Picasso that will occur in our community this fall.

The gallery is especially pleased that renowned art historian Charles Stuckey has agreed to provide written commentary on a selection of works for our Imagining Backwards exhibition catalog.

Foreword by Gary Tinterow
“Despite the frequent exposure and familiarity, Picasso’s oeuvre retains its power to startle and to seduce; his inventiveness remains inexhaustible. Any exhibition of his work is bound to surprise even the most knowledgeable observer, and I look forward with great anticipation to the retrospective of Picasso prints that McClain Gallery has assembled for Houston.

Given that this exhibition is mounted at an art gallery, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the role that gallerists have played in the creation and promotion of Picasso’s work. Although the artist is most closely associated with the German-born promoter of Cubism, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who represented Picasso briefly before the First World War, and again after the Second World War, it was the canny and irascible Ambroise Vollard who made possible many, if not most, of the prints in this exhibition.

Vollard is best remembered as the Parisian gallerist who, at the turn of the twentieth century, discovered Cézanne and Gauguin toward the end of their careers; and as the man who launched Fauvism with Derain, Vlaminck and Matisse.

But Vollard’s relationship with Picasso was absolutely crucial to the career of the young Spaniard, and, for the rest of Vollard’s life, they made great art together. Vollard gave Picasso his first show in Paris, in 1901, when the artist was not yet twenty years old. Following what was then a formula, Vollard sold almost everything, but kept nothing for himself, not even the portrait that Picasso made of him.

It took the urging of Leo and Gertrude Stein, young American collectors in Paris, for Vollard to see the value of Picasso’s art. Following their suggestion, Vollard bought a huge trove of Picasso’s canvases in 1906, making him owner of most of the great works from Picasso’s Blue and Rose Periods; after that he bought a cache every year until 1912, essentially subsidizing the artist’s studio production, enabling him to buy the finest drawing papers and large canvases.

In September 1911, Vollard bought a miscellany of fifteen copper plates, drypoint and etchings, as well as some plaster and clay sculptures which he had cast in bronze. Vollard steel-faced the plates to produce an enormous edition of 250 called The Saltimnbanque Suite.

For the first time, Picasso’s work began to be distributed across Europe and America, and The Frugal Repast, the largest of the plates, entered the pantheon of iconic European etchings. Once again, Vollard did not keep the great Cubist portrait that Picasso made of him in gratitude, selling it instead to one of his Russian collectors. But until Vollard’s death in 1939, the gallerist was the principal publisher of Picasso’s graphic oeuvre and intimately involved with his sculptural production.

Picasso was miserable sitting out the First World War in Paris. Vollard was one of the few dealers in operation, and they kept in touch, supplying works to the still-active art market in New York. Although Picasso signed lucrative contracts with socially prominent dealers after the war, Léonce Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein, the most productive relationship was with Vollard.

By the end of the 1920s, he had commissioned illustrations for Balzac’s Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, whose themes of artist and model, abstraction and representation, became the predominant motifs of Picasso’s work in the 1920s and 1930s, and the basis for the extraordinary Vollard Suite, 100 plates executed over nearly a decade and printed in 1938.

Picasso installed his young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter in Vollard’s country house, Boisgeloup, and the sculptures he produced there, inspired by Marie-Thérèse, are ever present in the Vollard Suite. Picasso’s wonder at the delight he experienced with his young lover is memorialized in the Satyr Unveiling a Nymph.

As Picasso’s marriage to Olga Khokhlova disintegrated, Picasso gave vent to his self-pity in great images like The Blind Minotaur and his gesamtkunstwerk, the Minotauromachy. Indeed, in times of distress, Picasso worked through his demons by working on prints and drawings, rather than painting and sculpture.

Many of the plates of the Vollard Suite represent a collaboration with the master printer Roger Lacourière, who remained Picasso’s collaborator long after Vollard’s death: Vollard did not live to see the printing of the witty and charming illustrations for Buffon’s Bestiaire. The artist’s unceasing experimentation with Lacouriere led to new techniques and unseen effects that continue to impress.

After the close of the Second World War, Picasso moved definitively to the south of France, where he took up new media he had not previously explored. His work in linocut, and especially color linocut, represents a highpoint in his graphic oeuvre, even if much of the imagery harks back to masters of previous centuries. As Picasso entered his seventies he seemingly entered into dialogue with his private pantheon of previous masters – Cranach, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Degas – without of course knowing that he would have nearly two decades of work ahead of him.

And while his output in the 1950s and 1960s was sometimes derided by his former admirers, the freshness and vitality of the work continues to inspire artists to this day. While the winsome Saltimbanques harken back to another world long gone, Picasso’s late work retains its urgency with universal themes of love and life, artmaking and death.

The sweep of graphic work that McClain has brought together proves yet again that works of art can truly transcend time.”

Gary Tinterow returned to his native Houston in 2012 to become director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston where he coordinated the Picasso Black & White exhibition the same year. Tinterow is considered one of the foremost Picasso scholars of his generation. His contributions began with the exhibition Master Drawings by Picasso at the Fogg Art Museum in 1981.

Working with the great Picasso collector Douglas Cooper, in 1983 Tinterow co-organized The Essential Cubism 1907-1920: Braque, Picasso & Their Friends presented at the Tate Gallery, London. The following year Tinterow became the curator for modern European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1992 he organized the Picasso clássico exhibition for Picasso’s hometown of Malaga.

Most recently Tinterow was a co-organizer of two landmark exhibitions devoted to Picasso: Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-garde in 2006; and Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010.

In 2003 he was awarded a knighthood in the Légion d’honneur and in 2012 he was promoted to Officer.

Pictured above: Pablo Picasso, Visage de Marie-Thérèse, 1928, lithograph printed on chine appliqué paper. Framed Dimensions: 22 5/8 x 18 5/8 inches.