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

Art in America, March, 1993 by Irving Lavin

In the domain of practical pedagogy the drawing manual - the academic course in draftsmanship - aspired, through a series of increasingly complex exercises, to change the simple and perhaps mystified neophyte into the divine Raphael.(32) Publications illustrating the method begin in 1608 with Odoardo Fialetti's Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnare tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano, and in 1753 William Hogarth anticipated Picasso's reversal of the sequence in one of the plates of his Analysis of Beauty. To be sure, Hogarth's purpose was not to undermine the system but, ironically, to exalt it by starting from an antique head admired by Raphael (no. 97) and showing "the reverse in several degrees, down to the most contemptible meanness that fines can be formed into ... composed merely of such plain lines as children make" (no. 105).(33) By the mid-19th century, in a French journalistic cartoon with political overtones (from a mock exhibition of fine arts), there is a veritable collision of childishness, caricature and the academic tradition.(34) The image portrays the cultural state of the "anonymous Republic" in the "noble genre." An armored Marianne, enthroned on her lion, holds a lance and a schoolchild's tablet displaying a nose, an eye, and a whole figure drawn with evident ineptitude. The lampoon suggests the immense symbolic and practical importance drawing manuals achieved from the mid-19th century on, with the development and dissemination of art education as a means of elevating popular culture. Van Gogh taught himself to draw by copying no fewer than three times the schematized exemplars in an important series of albums published by Charles Bargue in 1868-71.(35)

One of Picasso's early art school drawings (1892-93) shows him following precisely the same method, progressing from abstraction to illusion, from simplicity to sophistication. Indeed, the sheet is also copied from one of Bargue's plates, as is Picasso's contemporaneous drawing of a seated nude.(36) Here we see Picasso laboriously learning what he later took years to unlearn. Lithography - which demonstrated, especially through the technique of stumping, the transition from line to modeling - was the process of choice for illustrating such publications; perhaps it was this very association that motivated Picasso's disdain for the lithographic medium before the period with Mourlot.(37)

The academic system in general comprised three basic elements, all of which have counterparts in Picasso's attitude. The method progressed in stages with respect to form, technique and subject: (1) from simple geometric shapes to complex curved and undulating surfaces; (2) from linear definition to interior modeling and cross-hatching; (3) from parts or fragments of the anatomy to the complete body. Picasso's bull progresses in exactly the opposite way and arrives at a coherent and unified design of a whole new figure.

Seen in this light, Picasso's graphic method in the lithographs becomes crucial: it is not merely a progressive simplification and abstraction; in each series contour tends increasingly to predominate, until ultimately the ferocious bull is subdued by one continuous outline of quite enchanting grace. The modeling of brute form is metamorphosed into the delineation of pure spirit - there is no other way to describe the simultaneous degeneration of the bull and regeneration of this ethereal and apocalyptic beast. By his ironically serious reversal of tradition and evocation of "artlessness," Picasso seems to have given shape at last to that mystical ideal of disegno interno (inner design) artists had been dreaming of since the Renaissance.