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12/13/2007: "Picasso and the Bulls" by Ron Butler
A visitor to his home once asked Pablo Picasso, "What is art?" Picasso picked up a bicycle seat and a pair of handlebars and combined them to make a bull's head. "What is not?" he said.It's not surprising that the famous Spanish artist would select the image of a bull to whimsically illustrate the secret of art. From childhood until the final years of his life, Picasso showed a burning passion for bullfighting. Bullfight scenes and variations occur over and over in his work, recurring more than any other single symbol.
Major Picasso exhibits have been popping up all over North America of late, 30 years after his death, including the spectacular Cubist Portraits of Fernande Oliver at the National Gallery In Washingtin DC (until Jan 18). But it's to Barcelona that Picasso fans should head to immerse themselves fully in the artist's work -- and to get a genuine Spanish feel for the way in which bullfighting influenced his art.
The city's Picasso Museum is located in Barcelona's medieval quarter -- the Barrio Gotico, where narrow streets twist and wind beneath overhanging balconies -- on Montcada Street.
A residential center for Barcelona's high society between the 14th and 18th century,. it contains more private palaces than any other street in the city.On display in the museum are more than 3,000 works, the largest single Picasso collection anywhere. Included are paintings, ceramics, sculptures, drawings and sketches. Picasso's first oil painting, a bullring scene done at the age of 9, is here as well.
Picasso was born in Malaga on Oct. 25, 1881, at a las cinco de la tarde, five in the afternoon, the traditional hour in Spain when the matadors enter the arena. He came of age as an artist in Barcelona which he loved for its color and spirit. He lived there between 1895 and 1904 and returned often throughout his life for artistic and spiritual renewal. The first public exhibit of his works took place at the Barcelona cafe "Els Quatre Gats" in 1900 when the artist was 19.
As a child, Picasso often accompanied his father to the bullfights. Beauty and creativity are strongly involved in the corrida's aesthetic language. The visits made an indelible impression.
Over the years, the clash of bull and the picador's horse came to symbolized human relationships -- butcher and victim, love and eroticism, violence and cruelty -- filling his canvas, as it fills the arena, with a stunning tangle of violence and death.
Both horse and bull are central figures in Picasso's 1937 masterwork, Guernica, based on the bombing of the Basque town of the same name during the Spanish Civil War and often called the most famous painting of the 20th century. On view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for nearly 40 years, it was returned to Spain, according to the artist's wishes, only after democracy was restored following Franco's death. It now hangs majestically at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.For the artist, the ancient art of man against bull provided a visual structure in which the opposition of light and shade were represented, good and evil, masculine and feminine.
Picasso once confessed to his close friend matador Luis Miguel Dominguin that had he not been a painter he would have liked to have been a picador. Obviously, the painter who was five-foot, one-inch tall, stout and broad-shouldered, saw himself more appropriately astride a padded horse than in a bullfighter's skin-tight suit-of-lights.
In collaboration with the artist, Dominguin authored Picasso, Toros and Toreros (Le Cercle d'Art, Paris, 1962). The artist was godfather to Dominguin and his wife Lucia's youngest child, Paola. In the end, what may have fascinated Picasso most about bullfighting is its prevailing sense of death. Explicit and tragic, the climax is reached only after pitting man's courage and intelligence against the animal's brute force. Bullfighting also represented a rite of sacrifice for Picasso which he associated with the crucifixion.
A marvelous, open, sun-filled city, Barcelona gave freedom and flight to the imagination of a legion of artists (Dali and Miro among them). When visiting, be sure to go to La Monumental, Spain's second largest bullring -- it seats 19,582 spectators -- its graceful Moorish architecture also makes it one of the most beautiful.
Picasso went there often. Recalled Paloma Picasso, the artist's daughter, "My brother Claude and I loved to go with him to the bullfights. We would always get special treatment from the matadors. They would put their capes before us and dedicate the toros to my father."
The Picasso Museum came into being when Picasso's close friend and secretary Jaime Sabartes donated his own collection of 400 Picasso works to the city in 1963. To house them, the Palacio Aguilar on Montcada Street became the Picasso Museum.
Typical of other palaces on the street, the building had a central rectangular patio with an open staircase leading to the second or "noble" floor, the traditional residence of the owners. The stables, kitchen and storerooms were on the ground level while the servants' quarters were on the top floor. All have been converted to exhibit space, administrative offices, a library, bar-restaurant, cloakroom and gift shop.
When Sabartes died in 1968, Picasso donated some 900 of his finest early works, worth a multi-million-dollar fortune, to the museum in his memory. He also assumed responsibility of enlarging the museum's collection which he accomplished with numerous other bequeaths. A shrewd businessman as well as an artistic genius, Picasso kept many of his paintings off the market, causing prices to escalate.In 1970, the museum was enlarged with the acquisition of the neighboring palace, the Baro de Castellet. Recently, plans were announced for further expansion, with the acquisition of two more landmark buildings. Work is expected to be completed later this year ('98).
A major force in the art world for three-quarters of a century, Picasso was 91 when he died at his villa in Southern France in 1973. In paintings alone, he produced more than 6,000 canvases, some completed in a few hours; others took weeks.
The universal appeal of his work is reflected in the faces of museum visitors who are noticeably different in appearance than the staid crowds one finds at the Prado or the new Tyssen Museum in Madrid -- students and backpackers, mothers with babies, an off-duty rock band, Basques, Catalonians and, on at least one day recently, a rangy, golden German youth with a stunning African-American.
Bullfighting is deeply instilled in the Spanish heritage, but its appeal to Picasso may be found in a far more simple paradox. An artist's ability to freeze a scene in time is precisely what the bullfighter attempts but can never truly achieve.
The Picasso Museum is open daily (except Monday), from 10 to 8; Sundays 10 to 3. Admission is approximately $6 for adults, $3 for students and the unemployed; under 16 free.
