“If women didn’t attend bullfights, bullfighters wouldn’t exist. At least I wouldn’t.”

Luis-Miguel Dominguín, matador, Toros y Toreros, 1981

The theme of women watching bullfights from a box (palco) is a recurring motif in costumbrismo. From the drawings of 1905 to the linocut poster of 1954 in the form of a letter of mourning for Françoise Gilot’s farewell, or the poster for the Galerie des Ponchettes in 1960, Picasso returned to the motif of the woman on the palcobalcony, watching the fight from her vantage point. As was his wont, he drew inspiration both from the customs of the time – under the arches of the bullring, chairs were used to accommodate women, sometimes with their children, and standing men – and from pictorial memories such as Las Majas en el balcón painted by Goya in 1812, or traditional bullfighting posters.

As early as 1888, Van Gogh had depicted women in traditional dress in the foreground of Arènes in Arles. Picasso uses all this imagery in the service of his own vision of the woman in the arena, whose overhanging gaze consecrates the triumph of the bullfighter, eroticizing the stakes of combat as immortalized by Bizet in the famous aria from Carmen:

“Toreador on guard, toreador / And think, yes think as you fight / That a black eye is / watching you / And that love awaits you.”

Picasso illustrated Mérimée’s book in 1949, which was reprinted in 1957 in Le Carmen des Carmen, whose prints alternate feminine and bullfighting evocations, recalling the correspondences between bullfighting and love relationships that form the fabric of both the book and the opera. An aquatint contrasts the profiles of a matador and a woman in a mantilla on the balcony. The image escapes folkloristic mawkishness by scribbling orange over the visible weft of the first printing, drawing a palimpsest mirroring all the textual, pictorial, lyrical and cinematographic interpretations the text has generated.