Picasso’s Alter Ego
Pablo Picasso completed numerous
prints during his artistic trajectory, constituting a fundamental portion of
his oeuvre. As in his paintings, and as a result of his intense creative
process, Picasso worked in series, repeating preferred themes and processes.
With his tireless capacity for experimentation and absolute domination of all
graphic techniques, Picasso is considered one of the most extraordinary
printmakers of all time, with a body of work comparable in quality and scope to
those of Rembrandt and Goya.
As explained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, among
other sources, the Minotaur was a being half man and half bull, born of the
bestial union between Pasiphae, wife of King Minos, and a bull. Minos later
imprisoned the beast in a labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. Since Classical
Antiquity this mythological being and the labyrinth in which he was confined
have become archetypes, explored within the visual arts and literature
throughout the centuries, and have generated multiple interpretations, which continue
to appear today.
The figure of the Minotaur, mythological and
ancient, but full of life, appeared for the first time in the oeuvre of Picasso
in a drawing of 1928. But in the Suite, commissioned by Ambroise Vollard, which
Picasso completed between1930 and 1937, Picasso reinterpreted mythology, moving
away from the classical representation of the myth of the Minotaur and toward
his own personal biography, identifying with the doomed protagonist and placing
him within the circumstances of his own artistic life, as well as his romantic
relationships and sexual experiences.
In this way the myth becomes a symbol of
the labyrinth of the artist’s life. Accordingly, in his book Picasso à Antibes
(1960), Romuald Dor de la Souchère – curator of the Château de Antibes –
transcribed the following quote attributed to an octogenarian Picasso: “If you
marked on a map all of the routes I’ve made and connected the dots with a
single line, might not a Minotaur emerge? Picasso chose the figure of the
Minotaur as his alter ego, making an ancient myth new and contemporary in such
a way that one may “read” the Suite Vollard and La Minotauromachie as artistic
diaries of the complex avatars of his life during the decade of the 1930s –
“the worst epoch of my life,” as Picasso himself famously declared. Brassaï
also noted that, “Picasso liked the Minotaur because of his human side, all too
human.”
The 15 etchings dedicated to the
Minotaur in the Suite Vollard can be divided into four groups. In the first,
the Minotaur celebrates and drinks in the studio of the sculptor, together with
the artist and his models. After these bacchic scenes follow others with a
violent quality, in which Picasso demonstrates the animal nature of the
Minotaur. Finally the third and fourth groups show a defeated Minotaur: in one,
the half man, half bull is moribund; in the other, blind.
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