"Picasso's return to the classical myth was a gesture, a kind of search for a story appropriate to art, at a time when�for him�art's magical power was regrettably somewhat diminished," (Cox, 183). The classic Grecian Minotaur appeared in Picasso's art between 1933-1937. Picasso uses the myth of the Minotaur to illustrate the loss of raw and natural balance in the world around him. Picasso's world during this time was marked by the death of his father, war, and a controversial divorce. Thus, Picasso used the Minotaur in a series of paintings to illustrate this lost balance between the raw desire of nature and the human world�the balance embodied in the Minotaur. In the painting Blind Minotaur led by a Young Girl (1934), Picasso uses the fact that in the myth of the minotaur, the minotaur is confined to a dark and magical labyrinth in which all his bestial nature of eating Athenian youths is confined. In the painting, the minotaur is taken out of its bestial element and thrown into the blinding light of the world of humans where Picasso portrays him disoriented and unbalanced to the point where the youth that the once consumed is now leading this pathetic and blind abomination around. The darkness in the myth is what blinds the Minotaur's killer, Theseus. This aspect of the myth, darkness, is played upon through the light of the painting. With the darkness comes the magic and power of nature, while the light of humanity destroys that magic and creates this disorienting world humans explain with their myths and science. It seemed for Picasso that:
Scientific belief in cause and effect could not tolerate the apparent irrationalism of art and pagan religion. Science therefore forced art to make sense, and thereby deprived it of its chief power: the power to make a truce with the unknowable forces of nature (Cox, 184).
These "unknowable forces" lie in the mythological labyrinth of the Minotaur. It is important to make the distinction seen in the painting that Picasso values the natural and raw balance as opposed to the Grecian and mythological balance found in the Minotaur. Picasso's use of the Minotaur myth to lament the loss of raw balance in the world only begins the maze of meanings that Picasso utilizes the Minotaur for.
The Minotaur is the compilation of the unconscious desires of man and the conscious societal constraints that the individual puts on him or herself, thus Picasso's portrayal of the Minotaur goes beyond the simple myth to comment on the labyrinth of the human condition. This conscious is the "jailer" or the "agent of social and moral order," (Cox, 187). As result of his half-beast side, in many of Picasso's prints such as The Minotaur (1933) are placed in decadent and lavish orgies with women. On the other hand, his state as a social outcast, the product of extreme sexual deviance, the Minotaur is portrayed by Picasso as a tragic character caught between the two worlds he was created from. In the painting of The Minotaur with a Glass one can see this terrible dichotomy in which the Minotaur is miserably taking part in the human desire of drinking. The Minotaur evolves in Picasso's art beyond just a mythological creature to an existential figure who comments on the constraints of human life. Picasso portrays the Minotaur condition as what every human experiences, and the rhetoric in his painting declares that this existence is Sisyphus-ian and tragic. For Picasso, he is the Minotaur. Picasso dealt with existence in his art very differently than most, because like the Minotaur, he too had a miraculous birth as he was born dead until his uncle's cigar smoke revived him (McConathy, 41). He is directed and punished by the complex world and laws of humanity, when he would rather live like the Bull�free and unburdened by humanity. This burden is embodied in the sketch of Minotaur pulling a Dead Horse (1936), the horse being a symbol of humanness and domestication. By default, the bull aspect is what of the Minotaur is what Picasso values as the way to break out of the labyrinth of humanity.
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Picasso, Pablo.Minotauromachy, 1935 Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam.]]>
This is an extremely powerful statement by Picasso that is a metaphor for his life and career as an artist. His artistic brilliance comes from the interpretation of the abstraction of his simplicity. To think that he spent his life like the lithographic bull, throwing off layer after layer of technique and classical balance (essentially humanness) to reveal the essential bull in his art--trading his technical ability for symbolic meaning, is a dizzying proposition. He not only created art but lived his art.
Picasso demonstrates the bull/matador dichotomy to some extent in his early works expressed by Marrero, he later abandons it for a more symbolic struggle between just bull and horse. He untraditionally embodies the "graceful" and feminine aspects of the bullfight all in the horse rather than the matador. Picasso's "successive compositions" note this evolution to the bull and horse duality�a de-emphasis of the human member of the bullfight, the matador and the picador, leaving the gory and symbolic battle of the animals. This dichotomy is first seen in the early of Barcelona pastels and is later developed and redefined symbolically in Guernica.
The theme of the bullfight has been a constant in Picasso's artistic career, all the way back to the start of the century during his first visits to the ring. When he frequented Barcelona during 1900 to 1901, he attempted to capture the corrida in all its Spanish glory to sell to the exotic-seeking Parisians in a series of bright pastels of the bullfight. However they were not going to get what they expected. Superficially, from these pastels emanated the sense of Barcelona's summer and the vivid reds of the stands and of the blood combined with the yellows of the sands of the ring which mimicked the colors of the Spanish flag as Picasso declared his identity as a Spaniard (Comisarenco, 69). Yet, since these paintings seem symbolically thin when compared to the extreme symbolism in Picasso's later works, these future works, especially the Guernica (1937), indicate that there is much more meaning behind these simple pastels. Already this young artist was observing the famous bullfight in terms of the biases that he would carry on throughout his career and thus is it extremely important to understand his first impressions of the bullfight to begin to interpret the complexity of the Guernica.