PABLO PICASSO

(1881-1973)

Scène bacchique au Minotaure, from La Suite Vollard, 1933

Footnotes

Literature
Georges Bloch, Catalogue de l'oeuvre Gravé et lithographié, Volume I, 1904-1967, Berne, 1968 (Bl.192).
Geiser & Baer, Picasso Peintre-graveur, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre gravé, Volume II, 1932-1934, Berne, 1992 (B.351.III.B.d.).

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur. Pablo Picasso, 1960

In this image, the Minotaur is associated with the figure of Bacchus,
God of wine and ecstasy, taking part in a bacchanal, or drunken revelry
involving singing, dancing, libations and, in some accounts, sexual
intercourses of a rather lustful nature. The sensual and, at the same
time, perverse aspect of the scene is wonderfully expressed in the
loose etched lines, the bold curved lines, grinning face of the God and
contorted bodies and facial expressions of the women.

Bacchus also represented the juice, the lifeblood element in nature,
and his presence here alongside the Minotaur, drinking wine, reminds
us both of the unnatural and monstrous circumstances of the
Minotaur's birth and ensuing sacrifice to the monster of young men
and women by his guilt-stricken father Minos, as well as of the Mithraic
festivities in Antiquity when a bull was sacrificed and feasted upon with
wine to grant immortality to the followers of the cult.

The scene also offers a nod to the ambient hyper-interpretative
surrealism of the period, where sexual desires and nightmare or
grotesque visions were celebrated, not without a certain dose of
humour in Picasso's circle, as mirroring visions from the depths of the
artists' minds.

Of course, the Minotaur was a figure celebrated by the Surrealists,
who embraced the supernatural monster's "power [to breach] the
boundaries of the irrational" as expressed by Brassaï. They in fact
named their main journal after the creature: Le Minotaure magazine
was published between 1933 and 1939, at the same time as Picasso's
development of the theme in the Suite Vollard, and he naturally
contributed illustrations to the magazine.