Picasso's bull: art history in reverse - Pablo Picasso

Art in America, March, 1993 by Irving Lavin

In a burst of creative activity after World War II, Picasso produced four series of lithographs - most notably the well-known group of prints in which he deconstructed the image of a bull. Picasso's metamorphic process is here seen as an instance of modernist abstraction, but also as an exorcising of the accumulated legacy of the Western tradition and a quasi-pedagogical evocation of "the idea of a timeless graphic naivete."

On Nov. 2, 1945, when Picasso entered the lithographic workshop of Fernand Mourlot in the rue de Chabrol in Paris, he took up a medium he had practiced before only rarely, and never assiduously. On that day, however - as if to celebrate the liberation of Paris and the end of the war - Picasso began a veritable orgy of lithographic creativity that lasted four months.(1) He worked at least 12-hour days, almost without interruption; the hectic activity was described by Jean Celestin, one of the craftsmen who participated:

"We gave him a stone and two minutes later he was at work with crayon and brush. And there was no stopping him. As lithographers we were astounded by him. When you make a lithograph, the stone has been prepared, and if you have to make a correction the stone has to be retouched. ... Right. We run off twelve to fifteen proofs for him and return the stone to him in good order. Then he makes his second state. On a stone like that, normally when it has been retouched twice, the original preparation becomes somewhat spoilt ... And he would scrape and add ink and crayon and change everything! After this sort of treatment the design generally becomes indecipherable and is destroyed. But, with him! Each time it would turn out very well. Why? That's a mystery. [Picasso is] a real hard worker.... We used to leave at 8 at night and he would be there at 8:30 in the morning. Sometimes I would suggest that we should call it a day ... He would look at the stone, light up a Gauloise and give me one, and then we were off again ... and in the morning we would start again."(2)

We know everything Picasso did during that period and we can follow his progress day by day. The chief results of this frenzied activity were four series of images: two of female heads, a third of a pair of nudes, and the fourth of a bull. Picasso took up the themes in that order, producing respectively 6, 10, 18 and 11 versions; of every variant a number of prints - I hesitate to say proofs - were pulled, reserved for the artist. In each case the suite was made not from separate lithographic stones but from successive reworkings of the same stone.(3)

Celestin's description confirms the evidence of the actual prints - that what possessed Picasso was the process itself, the sequence of states and their cumulative effect as a series. Indeed, Picasso seems to have put into practice here an idea he had expressed a few months earlier when speaking of one of his paintings: "If it were possible, I would leave it as it is, while I began over and carried it to a more advanced state on another canvas. Then I would do the same thing with that one. There would never be a |finished' canvas, but just the different |states' of a single painting, which normally disappear in the course of work."(4)

As far as I can discover, nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. There was certainly nothing new about works in series on a single theme - Monet's church facades and grain stacks spring to mind; and there was certainly nothing new about multiple states of a single print - impressionist printmakers achieved varied effects comparable to Monet's through multiple modifications of the same plate.(5) Picasso had subjected some of his own etched plates to 30 or more reworkings.(6)

Three main points, taken together, distinguish the lithographic series. First, the states acquire a new self-sufficiency, with the separate reworkings treated quite differently. Instead of pulling a small number of trial proofs before a much larger run from the final version, Picasso ordered a fixed and usually large number of prints - 18 or 19 - to be made from each state, including the last, which was then given an additional, final, run of its own. Clearly neither the states nor the multiple prints made from them were trials in the ordinary sense; they were conceived as a unified, if not wholly predetermined, series and were meant to be compared with one another. Second, the designs were not simply variations but consistently progressive transformations of a basic theme; it is as if Picasso had set out to tell a story, an epic narrative that recounted the life history of a work of art. Third, the formal and conceptual sequence moved in the opposite direction from that of earlier suites. Normally, the successive states of prints, including Picasso's own, become richer and more complex. The bull starts out that way, with the second state darker and weightier than the first. Thereafter, however, the compositions become ever more simple and schematic - more "abstract," if that word has any sense in this context.