“Works are made with the intentions of the moment, of the time, of the state in which the world and I find ourselves […] they are memoirs that we write to ourselves, notebooks…”

Pablo Picasso, interview with Adam Saulnier for ORTF, INA archives, 1966

Moving to Paris in 1904, Picasso abandoned the reality of the arena as a metaphorical medium for intimate projections. This radical change of representation dates back to the summer of 1917, when he stayed with Olga Kokhlova in Barcelona and attended bullfights. In the imaginary space of a bullring deserted by men, the artist isolated the couple formed by the bull, a virile entity, and the horse, a feminine entity, which henceforth symbolized his relationships – fusional or conflictual – with the women in his life. The lithographs in the Suite Vollard bear witness to his passion for the central figure, Marie-Thérèse, whom he met in 1927. His partner sometimes appears as a bearded man, sometimes as a hybrid creature, half-man, half-bull, abusively named “Minotaur”.

Yet there’s nothing in Picasso’s work to equate this anthropo-taurine figure with the cruel monster of Greek legend, his ardent or tender double in love, other than a similar morphology. What’s more, Picasso turned the status of the Cretan Minotaur on its head when, in 1933, to illustrate the cover of the magazine Minotaure, he portrayed a luminous androtaure, sword brandished, the opposite of the bloodthirsty monster lurking in the darkness. Even though he had already conceived the creature in 1928, critics were quick to compare him to the Greek Minotaur. If there’s one myth that drawings and engravings illustrate, it’s the personal one whose hero is the bull-man, his alter ego.

“Works are made with the intentions of the moment, of the time, of the state in which the world and I find ourselves […] they are memoirs that we write to ourselves, notebooks…”

Pablo Picasso, interview with Adam Saulnier for ORTF, INA archives, 1966

Moving to Paris in 1904, Picasso abandoned the reality of the arena as a metaphorical medium for intimate projections. This radical change of representation dates back to the summer of 1917, when he stayed with Olga Kokhlova in Barcelona and attended bullfights. In the imaginary space of a bullring deserted by men, the artist isolated the couple formed by the bull, a virile entity, and the horse, a feminine entity, which henceforth symbolized his relationships – fusional or conflictual – with the women in his life. The lithographs in the Suite Vollard bear witness to his passion for the central figure, Marie-Thérèse, whom he met in 1927. His partner sometimes appears as a bearded man, sometimes as a hybrid creature, half-man, half-bull, abusively named “Minotaur”.

Yet there’s nothing in Picasso’s work to equate this anthropo-taurine figure with the cruel monster of Greek legend, his ardent or tender double in love, other than a similar morphology. What’s more, Picasso turned the status of the Cretan Minotaur on its head when, in 1933, to illustrate the cover of the magazine Minotaure, he portrayed a luminous androtaure, sword brandished, the opposite of the bloodthirsty monster lurking in the darkness. Even though he had already conceived the creature in 1928, critics were quick to compare him to the Greek Minotaur. If there’s one myth that drawings and engravings illustrate, it’s the personal one whose hero is the bull-man, his alter ego.