Picasso's Greatest Print

If one were to mark on a map all the places I have been, and connect them with a line, it might look something like a minotaur.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Picasso's Greatest Print: The Minotauromachy in All Its States, a groundbreaking exhibition of Pablo Picasso's etched masterpiece, Minotauromachy (1935). On view together for the first time in the U.S., the eight etchings that comprise this focused exhibition (the print's seven states, plus a second impression of the seventh state, hand-colored) represent the only existing suite of all the states of Minotauromachy. Together, they offer a remarkable opportunity to trace Picasso's creative process through the evolution of a single, complex image-one that gradually unfolds from bold conception to glorious fruition.

"We are pleased to have this monumental suite of prints on exhibit exclusively at LACMA," said Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "This is a rare opportunity for the city and its visitors to view not only Picasso's greatest print, but one of the great prints of the last century. Seeing all of the states of the print together allows us enormous insight into the mind of this master printmaker."

Picasso (1881-1973) achieved genius in every medium in which he worked: painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and ceramics. For more than seventy years, he experimented with the full range of printing techniques, producing the largest number of prints by any single artist in the history of art-a testament to the high esteem in which he held the medium of printmaking. In fact, for most of 1935, the artist devoted himself exclusively to making prints and writing poetry. During this time, he was torn between his foundering relationship with his wife, the Russian dancer Olga Koklova, and his love for the young and beautiful Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he was living by the 1930s while still married to Olga. The tenuous equilibrium between the three was shattered in 1935 when Olga discovered that Marie-Thérèse was pregnant. While locked in the resulting battle over art, property, and money, Picasso produced the most important single graphic work of his career, Minotauromachy, whose imagery presents a fitting allegorical struggle between good and evil, love and death, passion and reason.

A large and ambitious etching, Minotauromachy-a word Picasso created to unite two of his favorite themes: the Minotaur and the bullfight-depicts a Minotaur advancing menacingly toward a young girl who stands calmly holding a lit candle in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. Between girl and beast, a terrified horse staggers, reeling from a slash to its stomach. Collapsed across the horse's back, a half-naked female matador (possibly pregnant and bearing the facial features of Marie-Thérèse) holds a sword, poised between Minotaur and horse. On the print's far left, a bearded man (perhaps the artist himself, although Picasso is also traditionally identified with the Minotaur), wearing only a loincloth, observes this scene from a ladder, while two girls with two doves watch impassively from a window in a plain stone tower. The work's meaning has never been adequately explained, but much of its imagery would be adopted in 1937, when Picasso painted his great mural, Guernica-his outraged protest against the bombing of innocent Spanish citizens in the Basque town of the same name.

Grand, enigmatic, rich in the density of its extraordinary imagery, and masterfully executed, Minotauromachy's importance demands that it be considered not only in the context of Picasso's other prints, no matter how significant, but in the comprehensive landscape of his entire artistic production in all media. It is that rare object that both encapsulates and transcends its era.

By www.lacma.org