The 156 : Picasso's last graphic series

From 1970 to 1972, at the age of ninety, Picasso produced his last major graphic work—the “Suite of 156 Engravings”—demonstrating that, even at the end of his life, Picasso was still driven by the fire of creativity and inspiration. The major sources of inspiration throughout Picasso's career are reflected in this series: the circus and the funfair, mythological monsters, women—in short, all the major avatars of Picasso's creativity.

There is a sort of creative verve that can be found in the 156, as if Picasso is trying to create as much as possible before the end. The plates are worked and re-worked, the copperplate so engraved to the point it can barely hold ink anymore in certain parts. Eroticism and sensuality are major themes, as they were throughout his entire oeuvre, but here they seem to also be an expression of a vital, human urge, revealling the expression of life itself. Sex, love and painting had long been intertwined in Picasso’s art, yet, in this last phase of his life, this dialogue came to the fore, with the act of art making becoming a substitute for the act of sex.

Aware of his own posterity, Picasso always played with the great figures of art history. In the Suite of 156, as in the Vollard Suite decades earlier, Picasso revisited his elders, Rembrandt and Degas in particular. In the Suite, a special place is given to the fantasy of the Maison Tellier, the fictional brothel in Maupassant's story. Ambroise Vollard—the great publisher of Picasso's prints—had published a version of the short story illustrated by Edgar Degas.