La Minotauromachia

A prolific printmaker throughout his entire career, Pablo Picasso considered himself an heir to Rembrandt. His Minotauromachy etching is regarded as one of his finest statements in that medium. At the time he created it, he was married to Olga Khokhlova while also in a relationship with the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was then pregnant. The enigmatic image has been interpreted as reflecting the turmoil of what he called “the worst period of my life.” The composition is dominated by the Minotaur, a mythical creature with a bull’s head and a man’s body. Picasso began using the Minotaur, symbolizing the personality as divided between a conscious sense of responsibility and unconscious instinct, as his allegorical alter ego in the early 1930s. The etching’s title also references another of the artist’s favorite themes: bullfighting, or tauromaquia.

Here, the Minotaur advances toward a young girl at the left who bears some resemblance to Marie-Thérèse. Between them is a disemboweled horse carrying a wounded torrera (female bullfighter), whose abdomen is swollen as if pregnant and whose profile is clearly that of Marie-Thérèse. A bearded man climbing a ladder and two girls with doves in a tower above watch the drama. A psychosexual self-portrait, this provocative image alludes to Picasso’s complicated relationships with women and his problematic attitudes toward them. Elements from the Minotauromachy—the bull, terrified horse, and girl holding a light—also served as visual sources for Guernica, his 1937 mural about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism.

Picasso inscribed Brooklyn’s proof impression to his friend the Surrealist artist Man Ray.