ROOM TEXT PANEL: SECTION 7
Memory and Desire
When Picasso came of age as an artist in the 1890s, he was part of a generation that rejected the moralistic, story-telling function of nineteenth-century academic painting. To the very end of his life he consistently refused to tell stories in his paintings, yet his works on paper are quite another matter. As he explained:
'As soon as the drawing gets underway, a story or an idea is born, then the story grows like the theatre or life. I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they're up to. Basically, it's my way of writing fiction.'
Picasso's taste in fiction ran towards the satirical, grotesque, fantastic and bawdy. His imagery evoked Petronius' Satyricon, the voracious monsters of Rabelais, the theatre of Lope de Vega, the tales of Balzac, and (quite possibly) the scenarios of his own dreams. His erotic imagination was uninhibited. Some of his etchings referred to a famous series of monotypes by Degas showing scenes in brothels (cat. 75). Picasso was curious to know what had attracted Degas to brothels. Was he a voyeur? Others etchings poked fun at the legendary romance of Raphael and the Roman beauty known as La Fornarina which had been depicted in some paintings by J.-A.-D. Ingres (cat. 76-79). Picasso was curious to know: what kind of lover was Raphael?
When she reviewed an exhibition held in New York in 1970, the veteran American art critic Emily Genauer noted approvingly that Picasso, 'at eighty-eight, is utterly and magnificently obsessed with sex.'
In the early summer of 1963, the master printmakers Piero and Aldo Crommelynck set up a small workshop in Mougins with the express purpose of encouraging Picasso to resume his activities in printmaking. An extraordinarily fruitful partnership ensued. Between 1963 and 1972, Picasso produced approximately 750 intaglio plates, virtually doubling his lifetime's production as a printmaker. Two gigantic achievements were his Suite 347 (1968) and Suite 156 (1970-71), so called after the number of prints in each group.
His preferred media were etching and aquatint, and his technical mastery enabled him to use several techniques on the same plate. Piero Crommelynck has attested that: 'Not only was Picasso perfectly conversant with the techniques at his disposal, but he was always trying new things, combining them and putting them to new uses.'
Music 203
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