This activity is made possible in part by a grant from WNET/PBS 13, New York, through PBS 8/WDSE, Duluth.

In 1927, Picasso’s dealer Ambrose Vollard commissioned the artist to illustrate a special edition of “The Unknown Masterpiece,” a 1837 story by Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850). Balzac’s story is set in 17th century Paris, in the rue des Grandes-Augustins studio of the aging artist Frenhofer, the greatest painter of his day. Frenhofer tells two of his ardent admirers, Pourbus and Poussin, that he has been working on a masterpiece which for years has consumed all his creative powers. The two scheme to get Frenhofer to show them the painting by procuring a beautiful young model (Poussin’s mistress) for its completion. When they finally see the painting, it appears to be nothing but a mess of overpainted lines and layers of paint.

Had the master become a madman?

 

Picasso identified strongly with Frenhofer and was fascinated with Balzac’s eerie story. Just prior to this commission, Picasso had spent much of the 1920s producing works featuring the artist and his model – an extended self-portrait, perhaps, and a meditation on his occupation as a painter. In the 1930s, by a strange twist of fate, Picasso rented a studio at No. 7 rue des Grandes-Augustin, which he and others believed to be the house in which Balzac’s story unfolds. It was at this address in 1937 that Picasso painted Guernica, his own most famous masterpiece.

 

The etchings are drawn in Picasso’s classical style, where virtually all the forms and spaces are defined by sure, crisp lines. Such was his fascination with the Balzac story, that along with the thirteen etchings of this suite, Picasso created an additional group of over sixty engravings for the Unknown Masterpiece.