GREENWICH, CT.- From June 18, 2011, to October 16, 2011, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, will feature etchings by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), considered by many to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Picasso’s Vollard Suite: The Sculptor’s Studio exhibits key images of Picasso etchings from a group of one-hundred prints he made for the legendary art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard. On loan from a private collection, these superb works from the Vollard Suite demonstrate Picasso’s ability to please and astonish with equal intensity. The exhibition is underwritten by the Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund, Sylvia and Leonard Marx, and the 2010-2011 Bruce Museum Council.

In 1932, Pablo Picasso purchased the château Boisgeloup in Normandy, where he set himself up with a fully fitted-out studio for sculpture, a medium to which he would devote himself in the years to come. The excitement of working in the three-dimensional art form, which had always been subsidiary to pictorial art for Picasso, begat one of the great series of modern prints, The Sculptor’s Studio, forty-six etchings made over the course of a year, from spring 1933 to spring 1934. Rendered in the purified linear style that he first began to exploit during the First World War, these extraordinary images bring the classical world of the artist-and-model, as Picasso imagined it, fully to life. A bearded sculptor and a nubile young subject preside over most of the images, along with sculpted heads and torsos, visiting acolytes, friends of the model, and an occasional mythological being--the sculptor’s studio as phantasmagoria. Never before and never again would Picasso, with such clarity and elegance, reveal his innermost thoughts about the artistic process.