Picasso

Picasso, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identity

“In 1933 Picasso made a brief trip to Barcelona, and the following year he went back to Spain for a longer stay. Besides Barcelona, on this trip he also visited Madrid and Toledo. Impressions from these trips to Spain survive in a number of works on bullfight themes which he executed at Boisgeloup. In composition and color, the work shown here is perhaps the most striking of the series. Picasso had been familiar with the bullfight from youth. As a subject, it turns up in his work as early as 1901, in a painting that almost impressionisticaly subordinates the dramatic action to the atmospheric sweep of the arenahalf in blue shadow, the other half in glaring sunlight. Subsequently, the bullfight occurs again and again, either as main or subsidiary subject - for instance, in the sketch for the curtain of the ballet Le Tricorne, executed in London, 19 19, as well as the 1927 etchings for Balzac's Le Chef'd'oeuvre inconnu. However, in the work shown here the bullfight is treated quite differently. We see the beginning of a development which will reach its climax three years later in Guernica ... In the history of Picasso's art this 1934 painting, and the paintings and drawings related to it, mark a first step toward the creation of a wholly personal mythology which he worked out for himself during the 1930s. As early as 1930 we find him treating a number of traditional mythological themes, most notably in the illustrations to Ovid's Metamorphoses ... A Crucifixion dating from the same year is further evidence of search for a thematic form capable of embodying dramatic ideas. In 1934, at the same time as such bullfight works as this one, Picasso produced etchings and lithographs for Aristophanes' Lysistrata ... In the theme of the bullfight, since his trip to Spain and its renewal of childhood memories, Picasso saw a mythological symbol capable of embodying dramatic suffering, grief, and rage - capable of expressing, that is, the very feelings which were boiling in him in these years. Everything in the 1934 painting is focused on the dramatic clash between the black bull and the lightcolored horse. The arena and the features of the spectators are only suggested, serve merely to frame the action. The drama of ferocious struggle has become the theme not only of this painting, but of the whole world of Picasso's imagination. These shrill contrasts of form and color evoke the manner he will employ in reacting to the events of the next few years: they anticipate the rage, the grief, the despair with which he will greet Fascism's ever more stultifying victory over the human spirit. With Guernica, in 1937, historical events will have caught up with such anticipations as those expressed in this work and its theme" (cf. Jaffe 1996, 128).

This image: http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/ImgViewer?imageURL=./graphics/1934/opp34-090.jpg.