Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

Etching with scraper work and burin engraving, 1935, the seventh (final) state of the artist's masterpiece of printmaking, a richly inked impression with strong contrast and fine detail, on Montval laid paper, with full margins, a deckle edge on four sides, in excellent condition (very pale paper discoloration at extreme edges of sheet)

With the Picasso Estate stamp verso, ex coll. Marina Picasso

Brigitte Baer in Picasso Peintre-Graveur, Tome III, Kornfeld, Berne, 1985, p. 26, states that there were 23 impressions left in the artist's estate, although Sebastian Goeppert and Herma C. Goeppert-Frank state that there were 27.  It is worth noting that nearly all recorded impressions of Minotauromachy are now in public or permanent collections around the world.  In the last 25 years, only 12 impressions have appeared at auction worldwide.  This work is of the utmost rarity.

Minotauromachy has been subjected to many varied interpretations.  The Minotaur is oftern seen as the artist's alter-ego and the pregnant woman, lying across the horse, bears a striking resemblence to his young mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.  The work was executed at a critical time in Picassos's marriage to Olga Picasso.  Sebastian Goeppert and Herma C. Goeppert-Frank give the following vivid interpretation in Minotauromachy by pablo Picasso, Cramer, Geneva, 1987, p. 103. 

The Minotaur comes from the open sea; half-man, half-animal, he is a man in harmony with his animal needs, good and evil, beautiful and ugly... His legs stride ahead, the head thrusts even further forward than his torso, the immense outstretched arm with its raised hand reaching out further still.

The antagonist of the bull-cum-man is, surprisingly, a young girl, almost a child, with whom the Minotaur can neither measure his strength nor satisfy his sexual desire.  Yet the girl clearly has a force - a clairvoyance of certainty - which makes her the Minotaur's equal... In her left hand she holds up a lit candle, as if to illuminate something.  And there is no doubt that it is the light in the girl's small hand that the Minotaur is waring off with his immense one; the child is, evidently, bringing ligth to something that the Minotaur does not wish to see, does not wish to acknowldedge.

This shedding of light and the warding off of it has to do with the group of figures enframed by teh Minotaur and the girl... An agonising horse turns its head towards the Minotaur with an expression of utmost fear...

It is without a doubt tht Minotaur who, like a bull in the ring - not because he is evil, but because bulls are born to fight and use their horns, - has inflicted a fatal wound on the horse's stomach...

Across the horse's back, indeed interwoven into a visual unit with it, lies the helpless body of a woman dressed in a bullfighter's costume.  Did she intend to enter the ring against the Minotaur?... (It would seem)... to be the Minotaur himself who gives direction and force to the sword and what the Minotaur does not want to see: this woman is pregnant.  Her eyes are closed, she is lost in sleep, and the horse under her cries out... while life streams out of the opening of its body.  Death is the fruit of life and life gives birth to death... This is the fearsome reality that the lunging Minotaur confronts int he middle of the scene.  (He), like a bull in the arena, has satisfied his dark instincts by plunging his horns into the soft belly of a horse and who, half-man, half-bull, has lustily raped the one he loves, causing them both untold "little deaths".  The truth is a terrible one, and so the Minotaur raises his had to ward it off...

Suffering without combat would be an inconceivable disgrace for the Minotaur, for whom only a fight to the death is possible.  But with whom can he now do battle? Certainly not th egirl whose revelation he has been unable to ignore.  The pregnant women on the dying horse is now no longer a partner for his unbounded appetite, his lust for combat.  Neither can he return to the sea... the boat in the distance with its billowing sail is already half sunk.

What this scene... shows in the final analysis, is that the Minotaur can no longer remain a Minotaur.  Confronted with the truth the girl reveals to him, he has not closed his eyes, and he can go neither forwards nor backwards.  His only recourse is to take off his bull's head as though it were a mask and wear his human visage again...