La Minotauromachie (Minotauromachy),

1935

In the 1930s, at the height of his Surrealist phase, Picasso created some of his most innovative prints, often depicting the artist in his studio, the bullfight, and images of the Minotaur. All three of these themes are entwined in <em>Minotauromachy</em>, whose title pays homage to <em>La Tauromaquia</em>, Goya’s famed aquatint suite devoted to the bullfight. In classical mythology, the Minotaur was a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, representing unbridled animal instinct, but for Picasso the creature symbolized the artist’s savage alter ego, combining man and beast in a Freudian division of conscious and subconscious selves.

At the height of his Surrealist phase preceding the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Pablo Picasso painted little but became obsessed with etching, creating some of his most powerful and innovative prints, which were devoted to images of the artist in his studio, bullfights, or the Minotaur. All of these themes are elaborately entwined in <em>Minotauromachy</em>, whose title is a clever wordplay on <em>La Tauromaquia</em>, Goya’s masterful suite of etchings, published in 1819, depicting the history and horrors of bullfighting. In Classical mythology, the Minotaur was a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull that represented unbridled animal instinct. For Picasso, the creature represented an alter ego, combining both man and beast in a Freudian division of conscious and subconscious selves. In this work of strong contrasts, the figures appear in a shallow, stage-like space, as if in a dream. On the dark, left-hand side, an innocent girl with flowers is watched from above as she bravely holds aloft a lighted candle to stop the raging Minotaur from advancing on the right. The monster stands over a female matador lying astride her disemboweled horse, while shielding his eyes from the candle’s blinding light. When this print was made, the artist’s mistress, the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, was pregnant with his child. In Picasso’s autobiographical allegory, the Minotaur as a beast has brought death to the woman matador, but the purity of the new life within his lover halts the man within the monster whom the bullfighter failed to slay. In 1936, the artist gave this rare signed proof to his friend Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, on the condition that he keep it for his personal collection. In 1947, Barr wrote that he believed <em>Minotauromachy</em> "to be the greatest single print thus far produced in this century."