This virtual exhibition was created during the Fall semester of 2016 by the students in the Humanities Lab AR471 Picasso’s Suite Vollard and Its Contexts. Named after the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard who commissioned it, the Suite consists in one hundred etchings that Picasso created between 1930 and 1937. Often seen as a meditation on the relationship between life, love, and art, the Suite offered the perfect focus for an “object-centered” course, supporting research for an entire semester by a group of students, who, in addition to researching each a print (their catalogue entries and papers are included here), created this virtual exhibition, meant to provide the contexts for the prints’ production: historical, cultural, biographical, but also iconographic and stylistic.
We are grateful to the Colby College Center for the Arts and Humanities’s generous grant, to Mark Wardecker and Ellen Freeman for their invaluable technical support, and to Sharon Corwin and her colleagues at the Colby College Museum of Art for their assistance throughout the semester. Professor of Printmaking Scott Reed welcomed us in his studio and contributed enlightening technical assessment of Picasso’s etchings. Our gratitude goes first and foremost to Peter and Paula Lunder for making this course possible.