Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso, was the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century when he died at the age of 91 in 1973.

He made major contributions to painting, printmaking, sculpture, stage design and ceramics and produced an oeuvre of about 50,000 items, which includes 1885 paintings, 1228 sculptures, 2880 ceramics and thousands of drawings and prints.

The Vollard Suite consists of 100 intaglio prints and, in many ways, is a summation of Picasso’s life’s work, a distillation of his thinking about art, life and mortality.

The art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) commissioned the suite of etchings, which Picasso produced between 1930 and 1937, and which Roger Lacourière spent a further two years printing and editioning.

Vollard’s death in 1939 in a car accident and World War II delayed its release until the 1950s by which time The Vollard Suite had become legendary and exceptionally expensive.

The visionary founding director of the National Gallery of Australia, James Mollison, secured a complete set in mint condition in 1984 to become one of the great treasures of the national collection. The British Museum in 2011 also managed to secure a set, after a private donation of £1 million, an addition to the collection which the museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, described at the time as, “one of the institution's most important acquisitions of the past 50 years”.

The Vollard Suite, to some extent, is a deeply autobiographical account of the turmoil in the artist’s life divided between his passion, his mistress - Marie-Thérèse Walter - and his wife, Olga Khoklova.

It is also a mirror of his times as Europe was hurtling towards war; the mood changes from the sun-filled etchings of Arcadia in 1930 to the nightmarish vision of the blind minotaur being guided by a small girl through the darkness of night.

Likewise, this suite of prints reflects Picasso’s virtuosity as a draughtsman and a printmaker as he mastered new techniques and redefined the art of intaglio printmaking. Moving from simple line etchings to engraving with a burin, to aquatint and sugar aquatint, drypoint techniques and the combination of all of the above, Picasso broke the rules and established a new order. It was in this new order of printmaking that subsequent artists, most notably David Hockney, were to rediscover techniques and find inspiration.

The 100 prints stem from many different literary traditions and projects in which the artist was involved, as elucidated by Dr Jane Kinsman in the accompanying book catalogue, but more significantly they engage with some of the basic themes of the human condition.

Picasso precisely dated each image, as he once mentioned to his photographer, “Why do you think I date everything I do? Because it is not sufficient to know an artist’s works – it is also necessary to know when he did them.”

Etching, unlike any other art form, enables the artist - to employ Picasso’s phrase - “to leave the trace of my footsteps.”

The Vollard Suite is one of the great treasures of the western tradition of art, and I have known people who are passionate about art to travel to Paris to see it at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, one of the few other collections to have a full set.

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra shows the suite contextualised in the broader context of Picasso’s printmaking.

This is one of the great exhibitions of the year, but because it is free, democratic and secular, and shown without the blast of publicity that accompanies a blockbuster exhibition, it will attract a smaller audience than it deserves.

Pablo Picasso: The Vollard Suite is at the National Gallery of Australia until September 24.