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.

Picasso’s sexuality was to a certain extent linked to Spanish machismo, virility and male dominance, all of which is exemplified by the torero, the bullfighter and the bullfight. The ritual symbolism involved in this bloody contest is not that of a duality involving man versus bull, but is more akin to a ménage à trois. The third protagonist being symbolised by the muleta or red cape signifying the female presence in this conflict, both as inciter and protector (the literal meaning of muleta is crutch, as in the cleft support, thus inferring that its role is to support the man – like a mother). But in the hands of the torero the muleta flutters like a young woman’s skirt stimulating and provoking the bull to charge (Fig.3).

The toreador and the bull are repeatedly used as sexualised images in Picasso’s work. In some instances Picasso transforms the bull into its classical minotaur form — the savage slayer of heroic men and ultimately slain with the help of a woman. Minotaur, bull and matador all conflate into autobiographic self-projections of the artist’s own conflicting self-images. Inevitably the climax of the bullfight acted out as the ritual plunging of the sword between the bull’s shoulder blades and the more dramatic moments of the sexual act are purposefully merged (Fig.4). Whilst the matador is symbolically slaying the bull in order to signify the ritual killing of man’s animalistic passions, the artist is indulging in those self same passions, his sword lies sheathed within the muleta. The sexual drive synonymous with the will to live was still part of Picasso’s agenda even in his latter years. In 1966 when he was in his eighties he became impotent after an operation on his prostate gland, soon after this physical handicap he commenced producing a series of etchings which are both extremely poignant and highly erotic.