PICASSO PRINTS. The Vollard Suite.

First edition. Hardcover. Publisher's original black boards with bronze titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. With 130 colour illustrations throughout. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm with some bumping to the corners, the boards and titles, bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the lightly rubbed and creased dustwrapper that is without fading, loss or tears.

The Vollard Suite is Picasso's most important group of etchings. Made between 1930 and 1937 the suite takes its name from Ambroise Vollard, the greatest avant-garde art dealer and print publisher in Paris of his day. In exchange for some paintings, Picasso produced a group of 100 etchings that reveal the themes that preoccupied him during this period. Here the artist and his muse (his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter) play out the roles of the sculptor and his model with brilliant invention and passion. At other times within this open-ended sequence of images the sculptor transforms into a Minotaur (his alter ego), by turns tender and bestial. Picasso, in a competitive spirit, tips his cap to Goya and Rembrandt, and above all engages with the classical world, its sculpture and myths. Published in celebration of the British Museum's landmark acquisition, this book reproduces its complete set of pristine prints for the first time alongside a variety of classical objects, as well as works by Rembrandt and Goya (from the British Museum's collection), together with fascinating photographs of Marie-Thérèse and Vollard himself.