Making Images Talk: Picasso's Minotauromachy

UDK: 7.01:111.852 https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1901019L Original Scientific Article PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIETY Received: 14.11.2018. Accepted: 15.01.2019. VOL. 30, NO. 1, 001-196 Ana María Leyra Soriano MAKING IMAGES TALK: PICASSO’S MINOTAUROMACHY ABSTRACT KEYWORDS We can say that Picasso’s images speak to us, and, as writing, speak to Labyrinth, Archetypes, us from that space in which any text – far from being reduced to a single Spanish Civil War, sense – “disseminates” its “truths”. Using the figure and the story of the Minotauromachy, Minotaur, Picasso devoted himself to one of the great themes of his Guernica, Aesthetics. pictorial work. The word “labyrinth” connotes, to the European mind, Greece, Knossos, Dedalus, Ariadne and the Minotaur. However, the Greek formula already represents a mythic and poetic outcome thoroughly developed from an imagery forged in the remotest eras of our evolution. The relationship between the image, the spiral, and the word, labyrinth is also linked to the perception of a drilled earth, excavated, with numberless tortuous tunnels which, in our imagination, provoke concern because they lead to the world of the inferi, the unknown depths of the realms of the dead. Juan Larrea, a little-known essayist in the sphere of philosophical studies, although, from the outset of international renown for Picasso’s work, he gives what is perhaps the best interpretation of Guernica and consequently also sheds much light on the engravings immediately preceding the execution of this painting, theMinotauromachy among them. The artist is not a prophet. He is not foreseeing what the future holds for humanity, but he does possess a heightened sensitivity that drives him to minutely scrutinise the conditions of the time that he has had to live, and he has a transforming eye for the symbols that constitute the deepest threads in the fabric of his culture. In Plato, the images and writing are silent. They do not answer our questions. But we now know that the images and writing can talk, and that an approach to them consists above all in “allowing for a reading”. This border area which, in Plato, makes artistic images and writing a phármakon, simultaneously a toxin and a cure, in these latter days enjoys its own ontological status: the image remains just an image and its effectiveness does not lie in representing something or somebody. As a result, the image has to be taken and assessed on its own basis. It is in this sense we can say that Picasso’s images speak to us, and, as writing speaks to us from that space in which any text – far from being reduced to a single sense – “disseminates” its “truths”, what is shown by means of images likewise gives rise to multiple pos- sibilities of sense and interpretation. Our purpose consequently consists of giving voice to one of the most interesting series of engravings in Picasso’s iconography, the Minotauromachy, and delving deeper into the meaning that the mythical image Ana María Leyra Soriano: Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid; [email protected]. 20 │ ANA MARÍA LEYRA SORIANO MAKING IMAGES TALK: PICASSO’S MINOTAUROMACHY of the Minotaur held – not only for the painter, but also for his era, the first half of the century elapsed, as well as for European culture down to our days. When Picasso made his first engraving in Barcelona in 1899, he was nineteen years old. The engraving is a small print depicting the figure of apicador , the man charged with executing one of the lances in a bullfight. The image depicts his out- line carrying an implement, the pike held in his left hand, by which he is known as “El zurdo” (the left-handed one). This name is printed on the only proof of his figure known and has been said to have been placed there by Picasso himself. In some cases, it has been thought that the reason for the name related to the way the image appears, holding the pike in his left hand, but majority of art critics presume it more likely that the picador was indeed left-handed and that Picasso drew him as he was. Picasso began his career as an engraver at the onset of the twentieth century and would continue to produce engravings up to some months before his death, when he exhibited a series of a hundred and fifty-seven of them at the Leiris gallery. His interest in the figure of the Minotaur began in Picasso when Skira found- ed the magazine, Minotaure, in the circle of surrealists. In this context, and given these relationships, Picasso created a Minotaur for the first magazine cover, plus eleven engravings between 17 May and 18 June 1933. In all these drawings, the for- mal language is classical. After 1933 he continued to be interested in making works with mythological figures: centaurs, minotaurs, fauns. Spanish art critic and schol- ar Palau i Fabre defines them as products of his imagination because, as in Greece, they fulfilled a need to express intimate aspects of the human being, in this case the Picasso human being (Palau i Fabre 1968: 53). In 1933, Picasso was fifty-two, at a complicated time in his life. He met Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave him a daughter, Maya, in 1935. This was the period of the Sculptor and Model engravings and he had been doing works commissioned by Vollard, the collector with whom he worked. The entire set would come to be known as the Vollard Suite. The works chosen by Vollard number a hundred; a part of them revolves around the Sculptor and Model theme and another part around the theme of bulls and the Minotaur… blind, beaten, winged, dying, playing or raping. Using the figure and the story of the Minotaur, Picasso devoted himself to one of the great themes of his pictorial work. A drawing from as early as 27 March 1928 represents a bull-man, and we have fifteen engravings of the Minotaur and the blind minotaur. One of the last aquatints included in the series by Vollard is the Faun Unveiling a Woman. In 1935, he executed an etching, the Minotauromachy, of which we know five proofs serv- ing to track the development of the creative process, throughout which the artist progressively introduces nuances. In studying the history of engraving, we find no artist as prolific in number, technical richness and theme as Picasso. Over two thousand prints of his have been catalogued and, in the opinion of experts, we can rate them as high as to degree of perfection as those of Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi or Goya. It may thus be concluded that Picasso is undeniably the artist of greatest importance in twentieth-century engraving. He also illustrated texts, but the value of his works and achievements are at the same level in text illustrations such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis or Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece as in his stand-alone prints, the themes of which correspond to given moments in his own personal interests and inspiration. He keeps investigating, REFLECTIONS ON AESTHETICS FROM THE EUROPEAN OCCIDENT │ 21 experimenting, although he may not have considered his works as results of exper- imentation because he always said, when the things I wanted to represent required another form of expression, I never hesitated to appropriate it. I have never rehearsed or experimented. Whenever I wanted to say something, I have done so in the manner I felt it should be said (Pablo Picasso 1974). Picasso was always open to new trials using new textures and new elements; the process of searching was of more interest to him than what he might find in the end. The engravings he made commissioned by Vollard represent a decisive step in his pictorial iconography. His interests progress from the image of the Painter and Model to that of the Sculptor and Model. Picasso learned with every step he took. Sometimes he worked with lines; at others, he used more pictorial techniques, such as black etching or the sugar-lift aquatint process he was taught by Roger Lacourière, one of the most outstanding French engravers at the time. Lacourrière went to both Picasso’s studio in Paris and to his home on the Côte d’Azure. While working on the Minotauromachy, Picasso practically stopped painting. This is a large etching with scrapings, the existence of which we know from five artist’s proofs, on the basis of which we are able to study the changes he introduced into the artwork. In the first proofs, the space is divided into two halves, and in the last proofs the final result is the unification of the space. The blacks heighten the night-time atmo- sphere of the work. The outcome of all the work on the Minotauromachy is that it practically enables us to follow the entire creative process step by step up to the final state. However, the evolution of his techniques is not the aspect that will en- gage our greatest interest in this work (Balada 1982). A point of maximum interest in the Vollard Suite is represented by four works executed from September to November 1934, in which the character of the Mi- notaur reappears in the form of the Blind Minotaur. The monster here is a pained creature, much less threatening, even deserving of compassion and support. The novel idea it poses is the relationship between the little girl and the Minotaur, the woman and the horse. As though Picasso’s preoccupation at the time lay in the relationship between rationality and irrationality, instinct and sexuality, or the hy- brid nature of the human being as beast and man at once.

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