‘Between 16 March and 5 October 1968 Picasso worked with the master printers, Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, to produce Suite 347, a suite of engravings, ingeniously mixing various printmaking techniques and representing a compendium of characters from Picasso´s world: bullfighters, musketeers, commedia dell´arte and circus performers, as well as sexually charged variations on Raphael and the Fornarina, in which Picasso, whether depicted or not, takes the role of voyeur. Another voyeuristic composition evokes Edouard Manet´s celebrated painting of the courtesan Olympia, attended by a black servant who brings her a bouquet from an unseen gentleman caller. In Picasso´s version the naked Olympia is black, and she is watched both by a man and also by another naked woman.
Among the specifically Spanish figures who make frequent appearances in Suite 347 is the fictional go-between, known as the Celestina. Dressed in black, the Little old woman offers a naked maja to gentlemen callers in seventeenth-century outfits in many plates in the series. Another variation on this theme is the visit of several Spanish grandees to a child, who by lifting her skirt to reveal her sex, may be a prostitute. Sixty-six of the prints referring to the Celestina were republished by the Crommelyncks in 1971 as illustrations for La Célestine, a French edition of Fernando de Roja´s novel of 1499.
Picasso´s collaboration with the Crommelyncks stimulated him to experiment and, to certain degree, push the boundaries of printmaking techniques. This print, for example, he sed sugar-lift aquatint to get the very dark and also the dappled effects, which are present in much of the composition. Note how the dark head of the horse and the tallest standing man contrast the delicate and watery effects of the woman with a baby at the right. Note, too, the repetition of the dark curve of the bowing gentleman in the center and the lifted skirt of the child. For tiny details and single lines, Picasso also used drypoint, cutting directly into the copper plate with a sharp-pointed tool.
Texto: MCCULLY, Marilyn and José Lebrero Stals (eds). Museo Picasso Málaga: Colección, 2010, pp. 48-49.
