Picasso used horses and bulls, specifically the Minotaur, as representations of himself in his later works. Picasso frequently depicts “the beast” (Cowling) as blind, angry, and slightly confused, often led by the hand of a young girl. The Minotaur, a half-bull-half-human creature from Greek myth, lived on the island of Crete, imprisoned in the Labyrinth of the notoriously cruel king Minos. The Minotaur sated his appetites, both sexual and gastronomic, on young maidens and is frequently regarded as an icon of sexual perversion and cruelty. Picasso’s later representations, then, in which the self-referential Minotaur requires the gentle guidance of a child is ironic. The Minotaur alludes both to Picasso’s famous sexual appetites (see Seymour) and to an emotional or psychological distance between himself and the women in his life; indeed the artist depicts himself as entirely different species from the women in these paintings! John Richardson writes that “In the role of Minotaur, Picasso would maneuver the woman he loved into sacrificing not just her body and her will but, in the case of Dora Maar [who suffered a breakdown she split with Picasso], her peace of mind and, in that of Jaqueline, [who killed herself,] her sanity and life to his art” (Richardson 50).
.JPG)
Yet the Minotaur, in his confused helplessness, also alludes to the emotional vulnerabilities underlying the artist’s powerful exterior persona. The likenesses suggest that he needed women in his later life, required their ‘guidance.’ Interestingly, the Minotaur’s blindness also recalls the metaphoric blindness of the black-eyed male actor in Picasso’s 1905 Actor & Child. Unlike the blind Minotaur who is tamed by girls, the actor in Actor & Child is depicted as a sexual predator ready to prey upon a young boy, perhaps suggesting sexual appetites which were directed not toward females, but towards males.
Picasso already seems to hint an ‘animal’ motif in the exaggerated musculature and stretched neck of his first Nude Young Boy, but he explores the horse—a ‘Minotaur prototype’ that would appear in some of his works from the twenties—as symbol even more fully in Boy Leading a Horse (1906), in which an adolescent male nude of similarly muscular, symmetrical form is depicted leading a horse across an empty plane. This was the Picasso’s first full scale to include a horse (Cowling). The foreground of the painting is rose, the background a dark gray-blue, suggesting that both the virile boy and the horse, as symbol, are just emerging from the shadowy ambiguities of Picasso’s life with Jacob. At the time, Picasso had moved in with his mistress Fernande Olivier in Gósol and into what must have seemed a more clearly virile role himself (Cowling). Elizabeth Cowling writes in Picasso and Greece, that the boy’s body in this painting seems “a visible incarnation of a search for harmony,” the harmony, it seems, of the artist’s own sexual identities (Cowling). This echoes the sexually-charged ‘balancing act’ of the boy in Acrobat With Ball. Identity in this painting, however, is secure. Cowling refers to the boy as in “monumental stasis” likening his figure to the Greek warrior-statue Kouros (Cowling). The harmony and stability of this painting reflect Picasso’s own attempt to achieve a stable, harmonious, and virile sexual-artistic self and the introduction of the horse alongside Picasso’s kouros-self introduces the horse as symbol.
Ultimately, however, the Minotaur also represents the mature Picasso, the self-sculpted persona of the artist at the end of his tumultuous career. The “blind beast” is something to be desired, something idolized in his paintings over the course of many years, particularly in the 1930’s and 1940’s.