Le Cocu Magnifique - Plate V - SOLD

Hand signed and numbered. Edition of 30 prints.Published in the catalogue "Picasso: catalog of the printed graphic work 1904-1967", by Georges Bloch, Kornfeld et Klipstein, Berne, 1968, N.1251, pp. 266. Pablo Picasso was eighty-five years old when he realised the twelve engravings for “Le Cocu Magnifique. Farce en trois acts”, a work by the belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck; the performance of this play took place the 18 december 1920 at the Théatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris.The protagonist of “Le Cocu Magnifique” is a man who, in order to discover an unknowable truth, that is the demonstration of his wife’s infidelity, paradoxically transforms her in a prostitute.This play, that bares the painful doubt of the importance, the solidity and the true existence of the reality, could be seen as the mirror of the cultural atmosphere of the beginning of the 20th century. The Picasso’s interest for this composition by Crommelynck could be explained through the passion of the spanish artist for dimension of the theatre and of the world of performing arts. Pablo Picasso creates the series of etchings for this work in 1966 and after two year he will do a selection of only twelve images from the original group of sixty-five engravings; this selection takes place in the atelier of Aldo Crommelynck, Fernand’s son, that the spanish artist met in the 40s.The engravings by Picasso will be published with the text of the dramatist. In the history of the livre d’artiste, it’s important to underline the first place of Picasso for his originality and for his conception of the connection between text and image. “Le Cocu Magnifique” is an emblematic example of his innovativeness; actually the illustrations of this work don’t accompany the literary narration; they have an autonomous development, since the artist follows an order that is only linked to the reasons of the figurative art.The engravings by Picasso don’t comment Crommelynck’s words, so it’s useless to look for the the characters of the theatrical text in the images by the spanish artist; certainly, it’s also useless to look for a comparison between the narration of the written text and the narration of the images.Even if there isn’t an immediate correspondence with the word, Picasso’s image is extraordinarily able to captivate emotionally the spectatorEnraptured by rhythmic development of the visual sequence, he is effectively as catapulted into the actions of each scene, in which there is a fascinating alternation of light and dark between the figures and the background.