History of Art: Pablo Picasso

Art of the 20th Century

A Revolution in the Arts

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	Pablo Picasso by Carsten-Peter Warncke The Image of the Artist 1881-1973 The Making of a Genius 1890-1898 The Art of Youth 1898-1901 The Blue Period 1901- 1904 The Rose Period 1904-1906 In the Laboratory of Art 1906-1907 Analytical Cubism 1907- 1912 Synthetic Cubism 1912-1915 The Camera and the Classicist 1916-1924 A Juggler with Form 1925-1936 War, Art and "Guernica" 1937 The Picasso Style 1937-1943 Politics and Art 1943-1953 The Presence of the Past 1954- 1963 The Case of "Las Meninas" 1957 The Old Savage 1963-1973 The Legend of the Artist _______ appendix: Pablo Picasso - Erotic Drawings 1968-1972 Pablo Picasso and his Women

A Juggler with Form 1925-1936

The various states of the "Minotauromachy" etching, and the India-ink and gouache studies of 1936, allude both to the ancient tradition and to the modern. The Minotaur invades the sculptor's studio. He is also seen dragging the dead mare, a symbol of female sexuality, from his lair. He is plagued by demons, and is vanquished by Theseus. But the creature can always be identified with the dual nature of the artist. This owes something to Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy", in which Nietzsche saw art as essentially a duality, possessing Apollonian and Dionysian features. His view was an un-historical one, projected upon Greek antiquity; but the interpretative structure it provided has proved widely useful. Picasso equated his sculptor with the Apollonian spirit, but all things intoxicated and impassioned were Dionysian. Both aspects of the creative duality appeared in his work.

Minotauromachy
1935

Woman with a Candle, Fight Between Bull and Horse
1934

Design for the Cover of "Minotaure"
Collage
1933

Wounded Minotaur, Horsr and Figures
1936

Of course we must remember that the violence in many of these works also reflected contemporary politics. France and indeed all of Europe was radically unstable at the time, and Fascism was on the rise. Spain had been in the hands of a military dictatorship since 1923, and it was not till 1931 that an elected government replaced it. Since 1930, the Surrealists had been increasingly committed to the Communist Party, but Picasso refused to be directly involved in politics. This does not mean that he took no interest in political events or was ignorant of social conditions, though it is true that his purchase in 1932 of Boisgeloup, a chateau 60 kilometres north of Paris, and his employment of a private secretary and a chauffeur, can be taken as indications of his middle-class established status.

Minotaur and Dead Mare Outside a Cave, with Young Veiled Girl
1936

Faun, Horse and Bird
1936

The key picture in political terms is the composition showing the Minotaur in the clutches of a gryphon figure, Picasso's variation on a famous ancient model, the Hellenistic Pasquino group, showing the dead Patroclus in the arms of Menelaus. It was done as a study for the curtain for Romain Rolland's play "14 juillet", performed in Paris in summer 1936 in honour of the election victory of the French People's Front. Like the bullfight, the use of the Minotaur motif shows the subject's symbolic value in Picasso's eyes, as an expression of social concern. The parallels with the increasingly critical political situation, and Picasso's preoccupation with the Minotaur and bullfight complex, eloquently suggest the multitude of meanings these themes can convey. From 1925 to 1936, Picasso used a stock of formal and thematic approaches that could be used for a great variety of purposes. It was an art of transfer. Unlike the previous period, this one did not end in a single work gathering all the strands together in one great synthesis, but in the end the times compelled him to create such a work. In 1937 he painted his great masterpiece "Guernica".

Study for the Curtain for "14 Jullet" by Romain Rolland
1936