Picasso’s 347 Series:

In just seven months, Pablo Picasso in a historical battle against the wave of conceptual and theoretical “art” that was the rage in avant-garde circles in the late 1960s. He rejected the notions of “anyone can be an artist, and anything can be art,” which was the rallying cry of the conceptualists. Picasso resisted not through words, but through a herculean creativity that pointed the way back to aesthetic beauty, technical brilliance, and the narrative of art history: the building blocks of his life and art.

In his ninth decade, Picasso created the remarkable group of etchings known as the 347 Series (March 16 – October 5, 1968). He collaborated with the master printers Piero and Aldo Crommelynck, who brought in a special press from their atelier in Paris in 1963 to Picasso’s private studio near Cannes. The relationship between the artist and the brothers Crommelynck, who were familiar with the demands and the working process of Picasso, was responsible for the extraordinary output of intaglio prints he created at the end of his life.

While combining different cultures, icons and periods in this series, Picasso was able to create a unifying theme throughout: that of the narrator and observer rather than participant. The works are a panorama of compelling imagery including, circus figures, musketeers, cabelleros, musicians, and painters with their models, many charged with an erotic tone. <br>

Picasso’s command of the challenging techniques of etching, engraving, dry-point and aquatint are revealed forcefully in the 347 works, along with the highly personal and facile drawing ability he possessed in his late years. Commenting on the series, the artist said, “I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to; basically it’s my way of writing fiction.” <br>

In “Picasso Suite 347,” (de Baranano and Baer, Fundacion Bancaja 2000) Brigitte Baer describes Suite 347 as one of the rare points in Picasso’s career where “he looked, not at his anxieties and deepest states of being…but rather at what he perceived of the outside world.”