Pablo Picasso - Bulls 1-11 (05.12.1945 - 17.01.1946)

• Picasso’s most effectively rhetoric depiction of the bull is a series of lithographic prints in which he makes a dramatic statement on the power of simplicity. In 1945, Picasso worked tediously in a workshop creating a series of eleven prints showing a bull going from a “plump” and detailed bull going to a linear and schematic yet graceful outline of a bullish figure. This process was described by Irving Lavin as being headed, “toward a preternatural state of illuminated absent-mindedness and incoporeality—before it had acquired the bulky accretions of Sophisticated European culture,” (Lavin, 81). Each stage shearing off bit by bit, a process that the lithograph pressman Célestin commented on: “ And I couldn’t help thinking to myself: what I don’t understand is that he has ended up where he ought to have begun! But for his part, he was looking for his bull,” (Levy, 120). Each print was considered a “state” charged with its own reality until, at the end the primitive contour drawing left was the essence of the bull—the same mystical essence captured on the walls of Lascaux.

• This idea of primitivism goes back to the beginning of not only the precocious knowledge that those prehistoric painters held in their paintbrushes, but also the naiveté of children. This is precisely why, by the end of Picasso’s career, he chose to essentially cut away all the complexities of the art that had been established before him and leave the world with powerful yet extremely simple messages. When asked about the disappearance of the “marvelous” simplicity of primitive expression, Picasso answered:

• This is due to the fact that man has ceased to be simple. He wanted to see farther and so he lost the faculty of understanding that which he had within reach of his vision…The same happens with a watch: it will go more or less well; but if it goes at all it is not so bad. The worse begins the moment it falls into the hands of a watchmaker…His manipulations will rob it of its purity, and this will never return…just as the idea of art subsists; but we already know what has been done to it by the schools…Its essence has evaporated, and I make you a present of what remains. (Lavin, 84).

• This is an extremely powerful statement by Picasso that is a metaphor for his life and career as an artist. His artistic brilliance comes from the interpretation of the abstraction of his simplicity. To think that he spent his life like the lithographic bull, throwing off layer after layer of technique and classical balance (essentially humanness) to reveal the essential bull in his art--trading his technical ability for symbolic meaning, is a dizzying proposition. He not only created art but lived his art.

Images• Pablo Picasso. The Bull. State I-IV 1945. Lithography. The Museum of

Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.

• http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/personal/reps/bulls/• http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/nbisaria/archives/001985.html• http://www.flickr.com/photos/renzodionigi/sets/72157622038648624/with/4844063528/ • http://behindthecreativity.tumblr.com/post/13577860911/pablo-picasso-bull-plates-i-xi-1945-46-a

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