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

Art in America, March, 1993 by Irving Lavin

These considerations, in turn, help to illuminate specific stages in Picasso's lithographic bullfight. I believe he conceived the series as a graphic corrida, with the lithographic stone as the arena.(38) The confrontation at first progresses in the traditional way, with the forms becoming denser and more richly modeled, while the bull becomes heavier and more aggressive. Then Picasso begins his attack: the forms coagulate and break into gruff, rhinoceroslike sections. On one momentous day, Picasso made two crucial "passes": in one, a sort of sketch-lithograph, he drew a delicate, purely linear bull, along with a menagerie of much less intimidating animals - rams, a cow, and doves; in the primary bull itself he introduced fines that delimit its constituent parts and change its dumb, brutish expression into an almost caricatured scowl.

The dual principle implicit in these parallel works continues thereafter. In the monumental isolated bull the preponderance of dark and modeled areas tends to diminish step by step in a relentless ritual of decimation and dismemberment. In a number of drawings and collateral lithographic "spin-offs" the bull is already conceived as a purely linear wraith, not in grandiose isolation but in small, multiple guises. Here the bull's awesome power is "exorcised" in a humorous and playful game of hide-and-seek. The once threatening enemy becomes Picasso's pet, executing a repertory of witty tricks and permutations like a tame circus animal commanded by its handler. Only in the eleventh and final state are the lessons learned in the practice pen, as it were, applied unflinchingly in the main arena. The coup de grace to the earthly academic bull is elegantly delivered by the reduction of his entire body to a simple continuous outline.

Even in his own working procedure, therefore, Picasso transferred to the realm of "high" art the qualities achieved in a domain of informal, spontaneous creativity. It can hardly be coincidental that during the same period Picasso also produced lithographs of bulls and actual corrida scenes; moreover, he invented for these works a radical collage technique employing crudely cut out paper figures like those he had made both as a child and, later, for his infant daughter.(39)

If this view of Picasso's lithographic series is correct, it implies an absolute historicism from whose all-encompassing scrutiny nothing escapes, not even the artist himself In this context one of the most salient manifestations of Picasso's conception of his own work may be understood. I refer to his practice - obsession, one is tempted to say - from his earliest childhood of signing his works, however slight and ephemeral, and to date them to the very day they were executed; when several versions of the same work were done on the same day, he would often number them in sequence. No other artist has left such a complete record of his production. It might be tempting to attribute this preoccupation to megalomania; no doubt pride played a role, and certainly Picasso in this way fixed his own place in history with unprecedented precision.