Arte Foundation: Pablo Picasso

Galería Colbrí catalogue #28, March, 1968

PICASSO AND THE MINOTAUR

WILLIAM S. LIEBERMAN

San Juan, February 22, 1968

Picasso has often turned to printmaking to explore some specific subject. One of his favorite themes is autobiographical, the artist himself. For instance, in 1927 he drew several etchings of the painter at work and in 1933 he composed a suite of forty etchings The Sculptor's Studio inspired by actual sculpture he himself had just completed.

The series devoted to the sculptor in his studio immediately precedes Picasso's etchings of the Minotaur. The scultor appears as a classic hero, bearded, nude and crowned with an ivy wreath. He is accompanied by a model, their relationship is intimate. The series rhapsodizes an actual love affair and expresses eloquently Picasso's romantic conception of the artist as a superior being.

The progress of this love affair is continued in Picasso's next series of etchings. The hero, however appears as a Minotaur, not the terrible monster of Crete but a sympathetic, whimsical sometimes pampered beast. In the first four scenes the Minotaur, accompanied by the model, is shown carousing and asleep. (Once they are joined by the Minotaur's predecessor, the sculptor!) In the next four scenes the Minotaur appears as a sexual assailant as well as a victim. He is shown raping a woman and then, in a similar position, dying and finally expired on the sands of an arena. The Minotaur is killed by his rival, a young man.

The last three scenes repeat briefly ideas suggested by the previous eight. We see the Minotaur with the model; the Minotaur and sculptor and their models; and fianlly, in one of Picasso's most memorable images, the Minotaur again, as an assailant. This sequence of eleven prints was etched for the most part in Paris, during four weeks from May 17 through June 18, 1933.

More than a year later, in the autumn of 1934, Picasso returned to the theme of the Minotaur. His treatment of the subject, however, is very different and the allegory so personal that its meaning can appear obscure. The Minotaur is no longer the happy beast of the previous year but a blind, noble creature guided by a little girl. The model is absent and, although she has disapperared, the child in two of the four etchings resembles Picasso's mistress as she appeared in real life. Their own child, a girl, was born the same year.

In all four versions of The Blind Minotaur three other personages appear: two sailors in a boat and, at one side, a silent spectator. In the first of the four scenes the little girl clutches a bouquet of flowers. (At the left, and upside down, is a completely unrelated image -- a study for another composition The Death of Marat.) In the last three scenes the little girl holds a dove. The Blind Minotaur contains many elements to be repeated in Minotauromachy of 1935, Picasso's most ambitious print as well as in the large mural GUERNICA, also composed in black and white, of 1937.

4. GEISER, BERNHARD - PICASSO, FIFTY-FIVE YEARS OF HIS GRAPHIC WORK (Biography and Documents by Hans Bolliger) New York; Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1965

5. GENEVA, MUSEE RATH - L'OEUVRE GRAVE DE PABLO PICASSO (Texts by Jean Cocteau and Bernhard Geiser) Geneva: Editions Pierre Cailler

6. LIEBERMAN, WILLIAM S. - PICASSO: HIS GRAPHIC ART, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART BULLETIN, New York, Vol. 19, No. 2 Winter 1952 pp. 1-17

7. LIEBERMAN, WILLIAM S. - THE SCULPTOR'S STUDIO: ETCHINGS BY PICASSO NEW YORK: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 1952

8. PARIS, BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE - PICASSO: L'OEUVRE GRAVE (Introduction by Jean Vallery-Radot), 1955

9. ZURICH, KUNSTHAUS - PABLO PICASSO: DAS GRAPHISCHE WERK (Geiser Bernhard, and others), 1954