Even in these early pastels, there are the beginnings of a shift to portray the bullfight as an untraditional conflict of animal powers by employing cultural nuances of the shade and sunny parts of the ring seating. In the pastels Course de taureux (1901) and La corrida (1900), the dichotomy between the sun and the shade as well as the dark bull juxtaposed with the bright colors of the people and the matadors vividly accentuates the duality of the two powers engaged in this dangerous dance. In Course, the colors of the smudges that stand for the crowd in the sunny part of the stands match strikingly with the capes and costumes of the smears that are the matadors. More importantly, however, in the foreground, there is a one dead horse and another bleeding vividly in the darkness of the stadium. Its blood is the same red as the matador’s traje (suit) demonstrating the “blood” connection that the horse has with the matador that would later in Picasso’s career be irreversibly cemented into the form of the horse. The darkness of the stadium plays on the idea that the dark influence of the bull is what left these dumb and domesticated horses impaled and dying in the wake of this savage power that one can only glimpse in the background of the pastel. Additionally, both the bull and the horse are dark figures contrasting greatly with the bright and sandy ring and the vibrantly colored crowd and matador. Marrero explains how these contrasts illuminate the fact that this is a different conflict within the bullfight cogently when he says, “In the corrida Picasso accentuates the element of contrast, the bi-polarity; the oppositions, the chiaroscuro, the bull/horse… He does not exhaust the ultimate phase of the bullfight but remains in the world of the animal. The torero is minimized, he scarcely appears,” (Marrero, 64). The bull and horse’s common shading in this pastel highlights the fact that these two are the animals in the conflict interacting on a whole other level, literally and metaphorically, than the crowd, matador, and picadors. This uncommon interaction is the basis for the conflict in Guernica.
Finally, this redistribution of emphasis on the animal (horse-bull) conflict from the traditional matador-bull conflict illuminates the tragic flaw and sacrifice of the horse. What is ironic about Picasso’s bullfights in general is that they never mourn the inevitable and tragic end of the bull that comes with the end of each bullfight. Picasso usually portrays the bull as triumphant and the horse consistently mauled, disemboweled, or impaled. In his paintings the horse is a tragic character because his tragic flaw is that it is in cohorts with the human aspects of the bullfight due to his domestication—the horse goes against his natural tendencies of being an animal, and consequently gets sacrificed and punished by the bull in the end. 
In the pastel Scéne de Corrida (1901), Picasso’s picturesque idealizations of the bullfight is suddenly shaken a little by the inclusion of this gruesome depiction of a disemboweled white horse, presumably gored by the bull whose carcass the horse is resting on. The relationship of color fits well with the interpretation that the bull is wildness and savage freedom from the constraints of institutions, while the horse represents the whiteness and innocence of domestication. An alternative title of the early pastel Scéne de Corrida is also Les Víctimes, further highlighting the status the horse as the victim in the bullfight. Thus, from the beginning of his career, Picasso empathizes with the slaughtered and martyred horse by redistributing the emphasis on the horse rather than the matador and portraying the horse in his early paintings as a tragic character. These early paintings point to the same themes found in later paintings such as Guernica.
Images
Pablo, Picasso. “Course de Taureaux.” 1901. Private Collection.
Pablo, Picasso. “Scéne de Corrida (Les Vícitmes).” 1901.Private Collection.