Railway Stations and Minotaures

Perhaps his encounter with the remote mountain village of Gósol, which was then largely inhabited by women because the menfolk sought itinerant work elsewhere, also reminded him of his childhood, which was spent in the company of his adoring mother and sisters. Perhaps the tendency towards a matriarchal dominance in Picasso’s work began even earlier than his Gósol experience, when, for example, in 1896 at the age of 13, he drew an accomplished Rubenesque or Rembrandt like portrait of an old man smoking a clay pipe, only to turn it over and draw on the back, in coloured crayons, an emotionally tender and far superior portrait of his mother (Figs.1&2.) His accompanying sketch books from this period also largely feature her comforting presence.

Even his cubist paintings, which on the face of it seem to consist of interiors and still-lives, are now revealed as encoded female portraits. Picasso, as if to illustrate this point to the curator, critic and historian Alfred Barr, drew around the contours of one of his cubist still-life paintings to reveal the figure of a woman, and reportedly added that this was therefore, "...truly a still-life".

To a large extent, Picasso’s sexuality was linked to Spanish machismo and its quintessential symbol — the bullfight. The ritual symbolism involved in this bloody encounter is not a duality involving man (killer) and bull (fertility and power), but is more akin to a ménage à trois. The third protagonist being a woman, symbolised by the muleta, or red cape that flutters like a woman’s skirt, both stimulating and provoking the bull to charge, she is both a provocateur and a protector. (Fig.3). The literal meaning of muleta is crutch, as in a cleft support, thus inferring that her role is to enable the matador to ritually slay the bull by plunging his sword between its shoulder blades and in so doing ritually act out the final moments of the sexual act (Fig.4).

Some times Picasso transforms the bull into a Minotaur, the slayer of heroic men, who is ultimately slain with the help of a woman. Eventually the Minotaur, bull and matador all conflate into autobiographic self- projections of the artist’s own conflicting matriarchal and macho self-images. In the confusing matriarchal world that Picasso inhabited machismo is both celebrated and denied. His paintbrush became the sword, dagger or arrow that was capable of plunging itself into the bull, minotaur, woman or himself (Figs.1-4 ) > .