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

Art in America, March, 1993 by Irving Lavin

Several factors suggest that the bull was, in fact, the main offspring of Picasso's lithographic orgy. The four series were conceived in relation to one another and form a coherent group, personally and psychologically no less than formally. The women evidently refer to Dora Maar and Francoise Gilot, with whom Picasso was then deeply involved, and the bull served, here as elsewhere in his work, as a self-image and a symbol of bestiality in general.(14) Moreover, Picasso started the bull series after the other three but then worked on it with particular intensity. In the case of the bull, Picasso actually studied the solutions he would then commit to the tortured stone: he produced concurrently several sketches, a watercolor and a number of intermediate states (of which evidently only single proofs were taken) and independent lithographs.(15) or a time, he even dropped everything else to pursue the bull to its end - or should one say its beginning?

The bull thus forms the centerpiece, both thematically and chronologically, in this complex group of interlocking sequences of quasi-autobiographical images. The bull also has a special place in the recollections of those who worked with Picasso at Mourlot's:

One day ... he started work on the famous bull. It was a superb, well-rounded bull. I thought myself that that was that. But not at all. A second state and a third, still well-rounded, followed. And so it went on. But the bull was no longer the same. It began to get smaller and to lose weight.... Picasso was taking away rather than adding to his composition... He was carving away slices of his bull at the same time. And after each change we pulled a proof. He could see that we were puzzled. He made a joke, he went on working, and then he produced another bull. And each time less and less of the bull remained. He used to look at me and laugh. "Look ...," he would say, "we ought to give this bit to the butcher. The housewife could say: I want that piece, or this one ..." In the end, the bull's head was like that of an ant.... At the last proof there remained only a few lines. I had watched him at work, reducing, always reducing. I still remembered the first bull and I said to myself: What I don't understand is that he has ended up where really he should have started! But he, Picasso, was seeking his own bull. And to achieve his one line bull he had gone in successive stages through all the other bulls. And when you look at that line you cannot imagine how much work it involved ...(16)

Picasso's joke about the butcher and the housewife reveals part of what he had in mind: to retrieve the bull's constituent parts, to recover and reduce the disjecta membra of his dream bull - bred of pure lines - to an elemental, disembodied, quintessential bullishness.

Another insight is suggested by one of the most striking aspects of the animal's metamorphosis - duly observed, at least in part, by the perspicacious craftsman - the progressive diminution in the relative size of the head and the genitalia, surely metaphors for rationality and brutishness. Picasso's bull was headed toward a preternatural state of illuminated absent-mindedness and incorporeality - before it had acquired the bulky accretions of sophisticated European culture.