WATERVILLE, ME.- The Colby College Museum of Art announced the major acquisition of a deluxe set of Pablo Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1939), a series of 100 etchings that is considered the artist’s most significant cycle of prints and a hallmark of twentieth century modernist printmaking. The landmark acquisition was made possible by the generosity of Peter and Paula Lunder, philanthropists and longtime Colby College benefactors, who also gifted their renowned collection of American art to the Museum in 2013.

“This is a truly remarkable gift that will be a delight to visitors and create a tremendous set of experiences for the generations of students who will learn from studying this phenomenal series of etchings,” said Colby President David A. Greene. “We are so grateful to the Lunders, whose generosity and unmatched dedication have made the Museum a destination for people from around the world and a defining asset of Colby College.”

Exploring themes of mythology, identity, creativity and sexuality, the Vollard Suite is etched in a neoclassical style that Picasso adapted from his studies of classical sculpture and traces his artistic development during a critical period in his career. Colby’s Vollard Suite is one of fifty deluxe sets that was printed on extra-large Montval laid paper in 1939 and is believed to be one of only eight deluxe sets that Picasso signed in full. In pristine condition and never before publicly exhibited, Colby’s version is the only completely signed deluxe set held by a college art museum and one of a handful currently held by a U.S. museum.

A large selection of prints from the suite will be on view at the Museum from June 2 through August 21, 2016, and the full series will be on view at the Museum during spring and summer 2018. The Vollard Suite will be incorporated into many Colby College classes starting this fall and will serve as primary objects of study for students in Colby’s Art Department. A future online project will offer an in-depth, interactive exploration of the work.

“We are immensely grateful for the Lunders’ generosity to the Museum and their continued commitment to building the collection at Colby,” said Sharon Corwin, the Carolyn Muzzy Director and Chief Curator of the Colby College Museum of Art. “The Vollard Suite is a masterwork that captures a major moment in Modernism, and we are so proud to welcome this treasure to Colby.”

The Lunders have helped to transform the Colby College Museum of Art in many meaningful ways, including support of Museum expansions with the addition of the Lunder Wing in 1999. Their 2013 gift of the Lunder Collection, featuring more than 500 works by American masters and considered one of the most important private collections of its kind, is among the largest donations of artwork ever made to an American college. The Lunders continue to be generous to the Museum, with recent gifts of work by Al Held, Maya Lin, Julie Mehretu, Kenneth Noland, and Pat Steir, among others.

Themes of the Vollard Suite
Picasso began the Vollard Suite in 1930 and completed it in 1937. He dated each print, but deliberately left them untitled and never intended for them to be organized around a specific narrative. However, certain pictorial themes emerge in the Suite that scholars have traditionally grouped as “Battle of Love,” “The Sculptor’s Studio,” “Rembrandt,” “The Minotaur,” and “Portraits of Vollard.”

Etched in a neoclassical style, the Vollard Suite mixes images of artistic repose and reflection with sexual fantasy and conquest. Set primarily in the artist’s studio, Picasso eroticizes the relationship between the artist, model, and art in the series, casting himself in the role of the sculptor pictured throughout. The suite shifts from works of serene contemplation of beauty drawn with a graceful, simple line to images of aggression, animalistic desire, and torment that are aggressively etched and heavily worked. An unresolved drama between tranquility and agony, power and impotence, classical harmony and the irrational forces of the human psyche, plays itself out in the series.

“In many respects, the Vollard Suite offers an inside look into Picasso’s state of mind and thinking about himself as an artist,” said Colby’s Lunder Curator of Whistler Studies Justin McCann. “He is asking fundamental modernist questions about the nature of art and the physical and psychological relationship between an artist and their creation.”

History of the Vollard Suite
Ambroise Vollard, a leading avant-garde art dealer and publisher in Paris, was a collector and promoter of Picasso, buying his first work by the artist in 1906. In the 1920s, Vollard had commissioned Picasso to create the illustrations for two books he was publishing. Picasso began the suite in 1930 and produced the majority of the prints in 1933-34. After completing 97 etchings, he included three portraits of Vollard to round the set up to 100 and handed over the plates to the dealer-publisher in 1937. Vollard hired Richard Lacouière to print them in 1939, but the unexpected death of Vollard that year and the outbreak of World War II prevented the sets from being published.

In the late 1940s, the art dealer Henri Petiet purchased all of the etchings from Vollard’s brother, Lucien. Museums began to acquire sets shortly thereafter, including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2011, a set was acquired by the British Museum in London. At the time, the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, referred to the acquisition as one of the institution’s most significant of the last fifty years. Colby’s deluxe set comes directly from the Petiet estate.