Picasso’s Suite Vollard: Struggle, Sex, and Spain in Female Bullfighter, III

Kat Restrepo

AR471 Plesch

1 The Suite Vollard is an eclectic assortment of completed by one of history’s most exalted artists. As intended by its creator, Pablo , this suite has no particular message, no predetermined meaning or prescribed interpretation—but is instead a collection of works to be deciphered by the viewer, print by print.

Picasso’s Female Bullfighter, III (fig. 1) is one of the thematically elusive works falling into the sixth “miscellaneous” category of the Suite’s different sections, yet nonetheless visually striking. When considered in a collection of etchings so clearly influenced by ideas of classical beauty, it is obvious that this print stands out stylistically and strays from the more rigid ideals of antiquity. In fact, it is actually quite ugly. It is undeniably violent and sexual, made up of crude, even primitive, forms. And with the three dark lines that crash across the plane like angry strikes of lighting, it could even be mistaken for a cancelled plate rather than a completed print. Yet there is something completely captivating about this work of art. There are the hands reaching up above the arena’s walls, suggesting an audience at a disturbing spectacle; there is the physicality of the brutish animals and the vulnerability of the nude woman, our “female bullfighter”; and there is the reference to the famous Spanish tradition of bullfighting and its recognized cultural relevance to the artist. In the context of the Suite Vollard, Female Bullfighter, III works to comment on the themes of chaos versus order and the opposition between primitive and classical art, as well as symbolically expressing Picasso’s emotional turmoil stemming from his personal life with his wife and lover Marie-

Thérèse Walter through the motif of the bullfight. Studying these underlying themes, we find meaning in the intentional ugliness, in the violence, in the spectacle. We find

2 meaning through symbolism, through circumstances, through comparison. It thus becomes clear that what initially drew me to this print, what seized my attention over ninety-nine other prints—the bullfight, the unknown relationship between the three figures, the question of ugliness—is exactly why this print is so meaningful.

Picasso’s Female Bullfighter, III consists of a chaotic gathering of lines and shapes. The lines explode in a violent uproar to create four distinct forms—a bull, a horse, a woman, and walls of an arena with the hands of those in the audience peering up above the barrier. Through its size and positioning, the bull is presented as the dominant force of the etching, anchoring the left side of the work. Like the other figures, the bull is constructed through crude lines. Prominent details such as his hooves, penis, and testicles, and back and chest muscles aid in the formation of the bull’s shape. His head is the most elaborate fusion of lines in his form, consisting of his sharp horns, defined nose, and furrowed brows. His piercing eyes and wrinkled face convey a burdened expression as he scowls at the scene before him.

The bull’s bodily mass is weakened by the espada that is buried in his upper back and the resulting buckling of his knees. The horse directly to the right of the bull commands the upper right half of the etching. Chaotic lines that construct a recognizable body and more detailed hooves, mouth and teeth, nostrils, and ears form its tangled body. The horse faces away from the menacing bull, its body contorted and front legs buckled, struggling to regain balance. Directly below the bull and horse lies a nude woman. Sprawled across the bottom of the etching, one arm extends up and wraps behind her head while her left arm rests on her bare chest. Her hair, which is made up of short and irregular lines, is scattered above her

3 head. Her face lacks significant detail yet her nose, lips, and chin are clearly defined in her profile. Small, connected spherical shapes form a sort of necklace around her neck and chest, placed at the top of her large, exposed breasts. Her waist is identified by the placement of her navel and the curve of her hip. The lines of her sides angle down, forming legs that converge in a triangular edge where her feet would be expected. Three dark lines that strike down from the top of the work and tear across the right side exacerbate the chaos of this etching. The lines, reminiscent of a stage light in its effect on the woman, end near her upper body and lower right corner of the work.

While creating the prints that would come to comprise the Suite Vollard,

Picasso did not follow any specific story line or plan any particular meaning. Instead, he “kept the plates open-ended to allow connection to be freely made among them”

(Coppel 43). Not bound by any predetermined parameters, Picasso had room to inject self-expression into the works, endowing the Suite with the “autobiographical strain” that characterizes his oeuvre (Coppel 25). Picasso noted how he “paint[ed] the way some people write their autobiography,” and thus his works of art, “finished or not, [were] the pages of [his] journal” (Coppel 25). It is clear then, from this understanding of Picasso’s self-expression through his art, that one must consider the context in which Female Bullfighter, III was created in order to fully appreciate its meaning. This print was completed in the midst of Picasso’s romance with

Marie-Thérèse Walter, an affair that wreaked havoc on his marriage with Olga

Khokhlova. Picasso and Olga met in Rome in 1917 and were married shortly thereafter (Coppel 26). However, his “life changed dramatically when he embarked

4 on a passionate… affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter” (Coppel 26). This relationship made a mess of his personal life, yet it also had a powerful influence on his art. Over the course of their eight-year romance, her “voluptuous features” and recognizable profile “would dominate his paintings, sculptures, and etchings, including those in the Suite Vollard” (Coppel 26). The varied depictions of Marie-Thérèse, ranging from a primitive gathering of lines to more detailed, classically influenced renderings, capture the stylistic breadth of the Suite Vollard but also expose the continuities of other themes that exist throughout the set of prints.

In the 1950s, art historian Hans Bolliger arranged the Suite into five thematic categories: “The Battle of Love,” “Rembrandt,” “The Sculptor’s Studio,” “The

Minotaur,” and “The Blind Minotaur.” Twenty-seven plates, one of which was Female

Bullfighter, III, were deemed “less thematic and more miscellaneous” and thus make up a sixth category (Coppel 42). These more miscellaneous prints still “include motifs that overlap and interrelate” with the rest of the Suite (Coppel 42). Female

Bullfighter, III is rich with symbolism and thematic references specific to the Suite.

This print touches upon the emblem of the bull as it relates to Picasso’s self-image and Spanish identity, comments on classical beauty through its more primitive renderings, and serves, as so many of his works of art do, as a sort of diary for

Picasso’s emotional state at the time.

Throughout his career, Picasso returned time and time again to the theme of the bullfight. For him, it was a symbol of Spanish culture, supplying “something necessary to the Spanish character”; it was, as he once said, “the proudest symbol of all” (Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda 107). Celebrated as a “national cultural

5 institution” within his Andalusian heritage, Picasso grew up attending bullfights with is father (Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda 107). Thus it is no surprise then that the bullfight, which was woven into the fabric of his cultural identity as a boy, flourished into such a prominent adulthood passion. Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s once lover and mother to his children Claude and Paloma, captured this fervor perfectly when she noted:

Pablo’s definition of a perfect Sunday, according to the Spanish standards was, mass in the morning, bullfight in the afternoon, whore-house in the evening. He had no trouble getting along without the first and the last of these, but one of the major joys in his life was the bullfight. (Beloubek- Hammer and Sedda 107)

As such a significant marker of his Spanish heritage, the bullfight became engrained in Picasso’s sense of self, yet as a cultural artifact and symbol of his Spanishness, but over time, also as a symbol of himself and his personal life. As epitomized by this print, the bull and the bullfight became a metaphor for Picasso’s masculinity and perceived sexual dominance, of his tumultuous love affairs and the many women in his life, and for this question of chaos versus order that he so clearly addresses in the Suite Vollard.

When looking at this print we immediately recognize the reference to

Spanish culture and its relevance to the artist. However, what truly captivates us as curious onlookers is not what we understand but rather what we struggle to make sense of. We are thus drawn in by the chaotic way with which such recognizable figures are violently interacting with one another and the desire to decipher both each individual figure’s intended symbolism as well as the perplexing way in which they have been depicted. This specific print, dated 22 June 1934, was completed

6 almost exactly one year before Picasso’s wife, Olga Khokhlova, had left him, fed up with his blatant and painful affair with the much younger Marie-Thérèse Walter

(McQuillan). Picasso’s marriage with Olga was riddled with conflict and, while he was the cause of his wife’s departure, the separation caused him significant emotional distress. Through the symbolism it contains, this print serves as a reflection on this moment of personal anguish in which it was created. Anita

Beloubek-Hammer makes the compelling argument that Picasso uses the bull and horse as a sort of symbolic battle of the sexes, in which the powerful bull (the masculine figure) overpowers the much weaker horse (the feminine figure). The bull, as the man, is “generally the victor in direct single combat while the horse, the woman, is the victim” (Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda 108). Pointing to another

Picasso etching completed in 1934, Great Bullfight with Female Torero (fig. 2),

Beloubeck-Hammer proposes that the struggle between the bull and horse “reflects

Picasso’s personal conflict at the time with his wife Olga and his young lover Marie-

Thérèse Walter” (Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda 108). Like Female Bullfighter, III,

“three figures make of the composition: the bull, raging in from the left with a lance in his neck,” “the unconscious femme torero” with her exposed breasts—Marie-

Thérèse, and “the rearing horse “with flailing hooves represents the disorientated and hopeless position of Olga.” The “impenetrable tangle of lines” exudes an

“expression of aggression”; there is “something threatening about the snarl of forms.” Beloubek-Hammer concludes that the message of this print is clear: “in this formal and emotional chaos, there is no winner” (Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda

109).

7 This idea of there being no winner is prominent in the chaotic Female

Bullfighter, III. The bull, typically a proud and dominant symbol, indeed, still dominates the scene, yet with an espada plunged through his back . This blow, in the tradition of the corrida, would be fatal. The horse appears overcome with distress, the nude torero exhausted with anguish. The spectators, who only expose themselves by reaching their hands up either cheering on the scene or perhaps they themselves begging for help, offer no support. In the chaos that it depicts, this print captures the unrelenting struggle for power that encapsulated the toxic love triangle between Picasso, Olga, and Marie-Thérèse. Picasso (the bull), whose secret affair had been exposed, scrambles to maintain his sexual dominance and authority over his women. Olga (the horse), tormented by the reality of her husband’s infidelity, grapples with the choice of running from her crumbling marriage or trying to reassemble all of its shattered fragments. And Marie-Thérèse (the nude woman), trapped by the damning label of mistress, lies naked and vulnerable beneath Picasso and Olga. She is at the mercy of their choices; in this position, she has no agency.

Thus, the figures in this print “are metaphors for the struggles of life in general”

(Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda 109). Their relationship on paper reflects the

“violence of life, and incorporates many elements of the struggle for power… as well as tactics of seduction” (Beloubek-Hammer and Sedda 109). The emotional turbulence and visual disorder of this scene are further heightened by the crude, primal style with which it is depicted.

In a suite so dominated by depictions of classical antiquity, this print’s raw, unrefined style is striking, even off-putting. In an essay for Critical Terms for Art

8 History, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer discusses ugliness in art, shedding light on possible reasons for Picasso’s use of it. Like Picasso and the Suite Vollard, she explores the meaning of ugliness as it relates to classical beauty. She contrasts the two, noting that in classical Greece, beauty stood for “reason, truth, goodness,”

“order [and] harmony,” while ugliness was associated with “the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance… in short, the other” (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 281). In its opposition to beauty, ugliness creates “an inherent tension within the work of art”

(Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 282). It is thus a powerful stylistic choice for depicting a moment of conflict, both for the tension it creates and the disorder it symbolizes.

In the case of a master like , it is clear that the ugliness of this print was completely intentional. The deformities in this work tangle the representation of the bullfight and its ritualized decorum into a messy configuration of bestial forms. Such lack of harmony is particularly striking when considered in the context of the Suite Vollard that is so clearly influenced by ideas of classical beauty. The intention becomes clear when we compare Female Bullfighter, III to another print in the Suite, Vanquished Minotaur (fig. 3), in which we are again presented with an arena scene, yet instead of a bull and horse, a nude woman, and the simple outlines of the audience’s hands, we see a fallen Minotaur, a nude male attending to him, and a precisely drawn audience. Upon examining the intricacies of each print, it becomes clear that the stylistic differences were deliberate. For instance, we could contrast the bull’s simply drawn tail, which is made up of only four lines, with that of the Minotaur’s, which is comprised of many more lines that aid in the portrayal of a curly, twisting tail. Similarly, the bull’s face and head

9 appears much less carefully drawn, whereas the Minotaur’s face bears precisely drawn nostrils, eyes, even the curls of his fur. Next, we must consider the hair and hands and facial features of the man and woman. The woman is shown in profile and thus only the lines of her nose, lips, and some sparsely drawn hairs are clear; her hands and legs appear unfinished, only recognizable in their context of the rest of her body. The man has far more intricate features: a clear mouth, eyes and eyebrows, even ears. His hair is thick and his hands are fully formed. The portrayal of the audience marks yet another distinct difference in style. The audience in

Female Bullfighter, III is depicted through crudely-drawn hands reaching up above the supposed walls of the arena, while the audience in Vanquished Minotaur consists of clearly drawn figures and faces, some of which are even interacting with the man and minotaur. The final detail of note is the artist’s signature in the bottom right of both prints: the first’s signature is messy and expansive while the latter’s is neat and small. When comparing details of the two prints, it becomes obvious that Picasso was, of course, fully capable of creating skillfully rendered representations and instead made a conscious choice in Female Bullfighter, III: he chose primitive, he chose bestial.

In this print, Picasso “deliberately disappointed conventional expectation of form” (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 291). He chose to depict the nude woman, whose reclining pose so resembles that of a Roman replica of a Greek masterpiece, the

Sleeping Ariadne (fig. 4), in a crude way. In another one of the Suite’s prints, Bacchic

Scene with Minotaur (fig. 5), we see a nude woman who also resembles the Sleeping

Ariadne. However, in this print, Picasso chose to depict her with much more detail;

10 her hands have clearly formed fingers, her eyes, nose, and lips are obvious features of her face, and the curves of her waist and hips, even the detail of her pubic triangle, create a more full-bodied representation of the woman. The nude woman in this print more closely matches classical ideals of beauty, especially when compared to the primitive depiction of her in Female Bullfighter, III. Thus this reference to classical beauty, one that is so present throughout the Suite, looks more like an ancient Cycladic figurine (fig. 6) than any Classical or Hellenistic sculpture.

The final touch of ugliness in this print, the last dose of chaos, comes from the violent lines that scratch across the work, cutting across the anguished horse and finding their end atop our female bullfighter. These lines most closely resemble those used to cancel a plate once the edition of a print is complete, as seen in examples of Edgar Degas’ retired plates (figs. 7 and 8). While these lines do not actually fulfill this function, this aspect seems relevant when considered in a more specific context. In 1917, Vollard acquired 21 of Degas’ cancelled plates and by 1919 he had “printed and published 150 impressions… of the cancelled plate collection”

(Annex Galleries). While Female Bullfighter, III was created nearly fifteen years after this specific instance of Vollard’s interest in cancelled plates, by then he and Picasso had known each other for almost twenty years, having met in 1901 (Bolliger ix).

Perhaps Picasso was exposed to and inspired by the cancelled plates and thus these lines contribute to carry a symbolic meaning. If Female Bullfighter, III was a comment on his interpersonal turbulence at the time, then these lines clearly point to a desire to move on, to annul. Like Degas declaring the edition of a print complete,

Picasso was done with the all-consuming conflict that leaked like toxic waste from

11 his marriage with Olga. These lines are a clear sign of the artist’s physical presence, offering the final symbolic statement on chaos, on perhaps sex and violence, and on emotional turmoil and its expression through art.

After nearly an entire semester of research, I have come to realize that what makes Female Bullfighter, III so meaningful, is that it serves as a lens into the mind and life of Pablo Picasso in the mid-1930s. The depiction of the bullfight shows

Picasso’s fierce pride for Spanish culture while his representation of himself as the bull tells us so much about his self-image at the time. The female characters of the print—the floundering horse and vulnerable nude—clue us into the disparaging way he viewed the women in his life. The overall chaotic and aggressive nature of this print as well as the lines that crash across its surface capture the psychological toll that Picasso’s personal life was taking on him, and the ways in which his anguish manifested itself through images of sexuality and violence. And finally, we understand the artist’s use ugliness and how, while this print belongs to a suite filled with depictions of classical beauty, he intentionally chooses ugliness as a powerful means of expression. In the context of the Suite Vollard, this print captures the struggle between chaos and order and the contrast between classical beauty and depictions of ugliness. However, in a broader context, Female Bullfighter, III serves as a sort of symbolic representation of Picasso’s emotional sate during the midst of the creation of the Suite Vollard.

12 Sources Cited

Beloubek-Hammer, Anita, and Julia Sedda. Pablo Picasso: Women, Bullfights, Old

Masters Prints and Drawings from the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. Berlin:

Gestalten, 2013..

Bolliger, Hans, and Norbert Guterman. Picasso's Vollard Suite. Introduction by Hans

Bolliger. London: Thames & Hudson, 1956.

Coppel, Stephen. Picasso Prints: The Vollard Suite. London: , 2012.

Gedo, Mary Mathews. Picasso: Art as Autobiography. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Gottlieb, Carla. "The Meaning of Bull and Horse in ." Art Journal 24.2

(1964): 106.

McQuillan, Melissa. “Picasso, Pablo.” Grove Art Online.

http://www.oxfardartonline.com [accessed 14 Dec. 2016]

"Mlle Nathalie Wolkonska (first Plate)." Annex Galleries Fine Prints. The Annex

Galleries, n.d.

https://www.annexgalleries.com/inventory/detail/19736/Edgar-

Degas/Mlle-Nathalie-Wolkonska-first-plate [accessed 10 Dec. 2016]

Nelson, Robert S., and Richard Shiff. Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago: U of

Chicago, 2010.

Robbins, Daniel. Picasso's Vollard Suite: From the Collection of Dartmouth College

Museum & Galleries, Hanover, New Hampshire. Hanover, NH: Trustees of the

Dartmouth College, 1980.

13 de Viejo, Isadora Rose, and Janie Cohen. Etched on the Memory: The Presence of

Rembrandt in the Prints of Goya and Picasso. Blaricum: V K Pub./Inmerc,

2000.

14 Figures

Fig. 1. Pablo Picasso, Female Bullfighter, III, 1934. Etching. Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art (Bolliger 23). [https://www.colby.edu/museum/].

Fig. 2. Pablo Picasso, Great Bullfight with Female Torero, 1934. Etching. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. [https://art.famsf.org].

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Fig. 3. Pablo Picasso, Vanquished Minotaur, 1933. Etching. Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art (Bolliger 89). [https://www.colby.edu/museum/].

Fig. 4. Sleeping Ariadne, 2nd century BC. Marble. Florence: Uffizi Gallery. [http://www.uffizi.org].

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Fig. 5. Pablo Picasso, Bacchic Scene with Minotaur, 1933. Etching. Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art (Bolliger 85). [https://www.colby.edu/museum/].

Fig. 6. Attributed to the Bastis Master, Marble female character, 2600–2400 B.C. Marble. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [http://www.metmuseum.org/].

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Fig. 7. Edgar Degas, Greek Landscape, 1856. Etching. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [http://www.metmuseum.org/].

Fig. 8. Edgar Degas, Mlle Nathalie Wolkonska (first plate), 1860–61. Etching. Santa Rosa: The Annex Galleries. [http://www.annexgalleries.com/].

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