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Picasso - Minotaurs and Matadors, exhibition review: Where beauty meets the beast

Irrepressible: Picasso wearing a bull's head: The LIFE Picture Collection/Gett
Irrepressible: Picasso wearing a bull's head: The LIFE Picture Collection/Gett

Of the many alter egos in Picasso’s art, the minotaur prompted his most extraordinary imaginative feats. Aside from evoking a lifelong passion for the bullfight — also captured here, in works from childhood to old age — the mythological creature, when it rampaged into Picasso’s art in the Thirties, reflected his trauma at a painful divorce, complicated affairs, and Spain’s inexorable progress towards civil war.

Its duality allowed Picasso, above in a bull’s head in 1959, to transform his vexed feelings: the minotaur is by turns violent and tender. In three prints made in one day, June 18, 1933, Picasso pictures him in a ferocious love-making scene, then tenderly watching a sleeping woman, and menacingly stooping over her.

They’re all masterpieces: tumbling, frame-filling compositions drawn in Picasso’s miraculous, unwavering line. Indeed, the prints, drawings and gouaches are the show’s real highlights — such as the transcendent group of etchings La Minotauromachie (1935). The oil paintings are not of stellar quality for Picasso — though for most artists, they’d be career high-points.

What leaps from this exhibition, whether in the bullring or the minotaur’s labyrinth, whether with the brush, the pencil or the etching needle, is Picasso’s irrepressible inventive genius.

Until August 25, Gagosian; gagosian.com