Minotauromachie picasso analyse

Picasso creates other legends surrounding the Minotaur that have become known through his partner, the painter Françoise Gilot. For him, the Minotaurs are rich people that come from the coast of Crete. Their houses, full of art and beautiful women, often host festive gatherings that end in orgies, which make women happy and with whom they maintain sentimental relationships. On Sundays, the Minotaurs are killed at the hands of Greek gladiators.

This exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía brings together virtually all the works referring to this mythological figure of great significance in the artist's creative universe. A total of seventy works, divided into five sections from the first appearance of the Minotaur in 1928 -the beginning to a period of fullness in Picasso’s global production which lasts until 1937- until the final representations in 1958, where the Minotaur reappears liberated from the previous theoretic responsibility, after the Guernica experience.

As Picasso said, the Minotaur is the line that connects the various routes he walked over the y

Minotauromachy

On Saturday, 23 March 1935, Picasso etched his “Minotauromachy” on copper plate. Developed in seven states, it features the minotaur, a mythological creature, part man, part bull, born from the unnatural union of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, with a bull that Poseidon, god of the sea, had sent the king. This is one of Picasso’s most accomplished engravings and one of the finest of the 20th century, considered an iconographic precedent to “Guernica” (1937). The minotaur, Picasso’s alter ego, is a key recurring figure in his work of the 1930s, the period during which he became involved with the surrealist movement.
Picasso presents a highly symbolic composition that is difficult to interpret, in which he combines both tenderness and violence, imbuing this etching with a marked visual poetry and at the same time making it a premonition of the Spanish Civil War. Around the beast, the artist creates a scene which alludes to paintings by the great masters of Western art and evokes, among others, details of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” in the Sistine Cha

Minotauromachy, 1935 by Pablo Picasso

Minotauromachy presents a provocative scene, full of symbolic content, is difficult but not impossible to interpret. Several actions take place in a narrow, confined space. The main protagonists - a young girl with a candle and a bouquet of flowers, and a huge Minotaur, a mythological creature with a human body and a bull's head - appear frozen in their confrontation. Between them a wounded female bullfighter is flung across a lacerated horse that snarls with teeth bared. Above, two girls with doves, symbols of peace, peer out from a window, while a bearded man appears on a ladder at the left. A tiny sailboat can be glimpsed on the far horizon.

Executed when Picasso's personal life was in turmoil and he had ceased to paint, Minotauromachy presents a deeply private mythology. Not only was his marriage to Olga Khokhlova troubled at the time, but he was also ambivalent about the pregnancy of his young mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, whose facial features are similar to those of the female figures. The paradoxical Minot

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