Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors, Gagosian, London, review: An extravagantly choreographed show

The Picasso show, curated by Sir John Richardson, examines his work which was steeped in bullfighting imagery and the Minotaur myth

The Spanish artist’s bronze 1942 work ‘Tête de taureau’ is featured in the display (Pics: © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian. Maurice Aeschimann)

My god, here comes that stuff of myth, Pablo Picasso, again, rearing up on horse back, thrusting his poignard, legendarily priapic, fastidiously misogynistic, short in the leg, long in the trouser!

All true? Goodness knows. Ask all those dead wives and lovers. What cannot be denied is his obsession as an artist, from childhood until his dying day, with bulls, bull rings, bull-fighting, matadors and picadors, with their gorgeously fancy killing instruments, his bloody-thirsty, sexualised fascination with the kill, the glamorous allure of the toreador, and how all this segues into ancient Mediterranean myth-making – with the minotaur at its centre. Why else was the inauguration of the Museo Picasso in his native Malaga celebrated with a Picasso-honouring corrida in the local ring, with Paloma Picasso so close to all the murderous action, in fact only just out of horrible harm’s reach?

This extravagantly choreographed show at Gagosian, with green drapes sweeping into what feel like private spaces and out again, sets it all out in brilliant detail, his life-long visual diary keeping – yes, you can call it that – about all this stuff, of how he went at it again and again, dressing himself up, dressing the myths up, mixing his modernity with the past, sometimes making great art seem so simply conceived and executed – look at this bull's head, high up on a wall, made out of a pair of bicycle handlebars and a leather bicycle saddle.


 Picasso wearing a bull’s head intended for bullfghters’ training, La Californie, Cannes, 1959 (© 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo by Gjon Mili/Time and Life Pictures/Getty)
 (© 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artsts Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo by Gjon Mili/Time and Life Pictures/Gety Image)

He used all the means at his disposal to tell his rampantly bullish tales over and over again: ceramic, sculpture, paintings, drawings, suites of prints – amongst the best of the 120 or so things here is a set of prints, ranged along one wall, from 1935, called Minotauromachie, which begins with a measure of monochromatic indistinctness and ends in flourishes of gloriously muted colour. There is so much savagery here in conjunction with so much intimacy. You watch him seeing how the furious tumult, of love, all that sweat-soaked knotting and interweaving of flesh, can be so much like a raging bull fight.


 Picasso’s ‘Barque de naïades et faune blessé’, December 31, 1937. Oil and charcoal on canvas. (© 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo: Maurice Aeschimann)
 (© 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artsts Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo: Maurice Aeschimann)

“The best matador who ever existed. His paintbrush is like a sword dipped in the blood of all the colours.” A fine poet called Rafael Alberti wrote that. It’s written on the window. John Richardson curated this show, the man who never succeeded in completing his magnificent biography of Picasso.