Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lisa Florman
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retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Venetian and Engraver’s Gothic by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens,
Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Preface xvi
Notes 208
Bibliography 244
Index 256
i l l u s t rat i o n s
list of illustrations
Picasso, Fragment of a Woman’s Body Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and
(beginning of Metamorphoses Book XIV), Philomela, 1930 (October 18). Etching, 22.3
1931. Etching, 13.2 × 17.4 cm. Musée × 17.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 22 RMN–Franck Raux. 31
2.6 2.13
Picasso, Two Heads (beginning of Picasso, Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October
Metamorphoses Book XV), 1931. Etching, 18). Etching, 22.3 × 17.2 cm. Musée
13.4 × 17.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck
© Photo RMN. 23 Raux. 32
2.7 2.14
Picasso, Nestor’s Stories from the Trojan War, John Flaxman, Thetis Finds Achilles Mourning
1930 (September 21). Etching, 22.2 × over the Body of Patroclus, illustration for Iliad
17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo (1st edition), 1793. © The British
RMN. 25 Museum. 35
2.8 2.15
Picasso, Numa Following the Lessons of Pythagoras, Picasso, The Sacrifice of Polyxena, 1930
1930 (September 25). Etching, 22.5 × (September 23). Etching, 22.4 × 17.2 cm.
17.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 36
RMN. 26
2.16
2.9 Picasso, La Coiffure, 1954. Oil on canvas,
Picasso, The Daughters of Minyas, 1930 130 × 97 cm. Donation Rosengart, Picasso-
(September 20). Etching, 22.5 × 17.1 cm. Museum, Lucerne. 37
Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 27
2.17
2.10 Picasso, Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar,
Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and 1930 (September 18). Etching 22.3 ×
Philomela, 1930 (September 18). Etching, 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
22.4 × 17.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. RMN. 38
© Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 29
2.18
2.11 Picasso, Hercules Slaying Nessus, 1930
Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and (September 20). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm.
Philomela, 1930 (October 18). Etching, 22.2 Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 40
× 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN–Franck Raux. 30
2.19 2.27
Picasso, full-plate etching of Hercules and Picasso, The Death of Eurydice, 1930 (October
Nessus, 1930. 31.3 × 22.4 cm. Staatsgalerie 11). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso,
Stuttgart. 41 Paris. © Photo RMN. 54
2.20 2.28
Picasso, unpublished etching of Actaeon Rubens, Cadmus and Minerva, 1636. Oil
Transformed into a Stag, 1930 (September 20). sketch, 26.7 × 42.2 cm. Private
Etching, 22.5 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, collection. 55
Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 43
2.29
2.21 Picasso, The Combat for Andromeda between
Rubens, Procris and Cephalus, 1636. Oil Perseus and Phineus, 1930 (September 21).
sketch, 26.5 × 28.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Etching, 22.4 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso,
Madrid. 46 Paris. © Photo RMN. 56
2.22 2.30
P. Symons, Procris and Cephalus, 1637. Oil on Picasso, Deucalion and Pyrrha Creating a New
canvas, 174 × 204 cm. Museo del Prado, Human Race, 1930 (September 20). Etching,
Madrid. 47 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
© Photo RMN. 58
2.23
Picasso, Procris and Cephalus, 1930 2.31
(September 18). Etching, 22.4 × 17.1 cm. Rubens, Deucalion and Pyrrha, 1636. Oil
Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 48 sketch, 26 × 40.7 cm. Museo del Prado,
Madrid. 59
2.24
Picasso, The Fall of Phaethon, 1930 (September 2.32
20). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Peruzzi, Deucalion and Pyrrha, c. 1516. Rome,
Paris. © Photo RMN. 50 Villa Farnesina, Sala delle Prospettive,
Rome. © Photo Alinari. 60
2.25
Rubens, The Fall of Phaethon, 1636. Oil sketch, 2.33
28.1 × 27.6 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux- Picasso, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1930
Arts, Brussels. 51 (September 23). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm.
Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 63
2.26
x
Rubens, The Death of Eurydice, 1636. Oil
– sketch, 26 × 15.5 cm. Museum Boijmans-
xi van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 53
2.34 3.5
list of illustrations
Rubens, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1636. Oil Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 6 (July 4, 1931).
sketch, 25.5 × 37.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Etching, 31.2 × 22.1 cm. Musée Picasso,
Madrid. 64 Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 76
2.35 3.6
Rubens, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1636. Oil Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 7 (July 9, 1931).
sketch, 30 × 14 cm. Museum Boijmans-van Etching, 21.5 × 30.5 cm. Musée Picasso,
Beuningen, Rotterdam. 65 Paris. © Photo RMN. 77
2.36 3.7
Meleager Painter, kylix depicting Dionysus Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 26 (November
and Ariadne, c. 475 B.C. © The British 18, 1934). Etching and aquatint, 23.7 ×
Museum. 66 30 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN. 77
2.37
Aristide Maillol, Pomona, 1910. Bronze, 161 3.8
× 53 × 49 cm. Museum am Ostwall, Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 16 (November 8,
Dortmund. © Photo Jürgen Spiller. 67 1933). Drypoint, 20 × 28 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 78
3.1
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 12 (November 3.9
29, 1934). Etching, 23.7 × 29.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 17 (November 11,
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 73 1933). Drypoint, 19.8 × 27.7 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 79
3.2
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 25 (January 3.10
1934). Etching and aquatint, 13 × 17.9 cm. Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 54 (March 30,
Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 74 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.7 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 80
3.3.
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 3.11
22, 1934). Etching and drypoint, 25.2 × Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 57 (March 31,
23.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.7 cm. Musée
RMN–Michèle Bellot. 75 Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 80
3.4 3.12
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (c. 1935). Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 89 (May 29,
Aquatint, 24.7 × 34.7 cm. Musée Picasso, 1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.9 cm. Musée
Paris. © Photo RMN. 75 Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 82
3.13 3.20
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 70 (April 11, Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre
1933). Etching, 36.7 × 29.8 cm. Musée inconnu, plate 4 (Paris, 1927). Etching, 19.4
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 83 × 28 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN. 100
3.14
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 83 (May 17, 3.21
1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.8 cm. Musée Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. inconnu, plate 7 (Paris, 1927). Etching, 19.4
Hatala. 84 × 28 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN. 100
3.15
Jacques Callot, Peasant with Hat in Hand, 3.22
c. 1617. Etching, 5.7 × 8.2 cm. Rosenwald Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 39 (March 23,
Collection. © Board of Trustees, National 1933). Etching, 26.9 × 19.4 cm. Musée
Gallery of Art, Washington. 87 Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 101
3.16 3.23
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 24 (November Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 45 (March 23,
19, 1934). Aquatint and etching, 24.9 × 1933). Etching, 26.7 × 19.4 cm. Musée
34.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 102
RMN. 88
3.24
3.17 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 28 (April 1933).
Goya, “Todos caeràn,” Los caprichos, plate 19, Aquatint, etching, and drypoint, 27.8 ×
published 1799. Aquatint and etching, 21.5 19.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
× 14.5 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. RMN–B. Hatala. 108
© Photo RMN–Quecq d’Henripret. 89
3.25
3.18 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 30 (April 22,
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 87 (May 23, 1933). Drypoint, 29.7 × 36.6 cm. Musée
1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Blot. 109
Hatala. 91
3.26
3.19 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 31 (April 23,
Sigmund Freud, “Psychological schema for 1933). Drypoint, 29.7 × 36.6 cm. Musée
xii
the word-concept,” from Zur Auffassung der Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle
– Aphasien (Vienna, 1891), 60. 97 Bellot. 109
xiii
3.27 3.35
list of illustrations
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 51 (March 27, Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 61 (April 1,
1933). Etching, 26.7 × 19.3 cm. Musée 1933). Etching, 26.7 × 19.3 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 110 Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 120
3.28 3.36
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 58 (March 31, Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 76 (May 5,
1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.8 cm. Musée 1933). Etching and aquatint, 26.7 ×
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 112 19.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN–B. Hatala. 121
3.29
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 59 (March 31, 3.37
1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 69 (April 8,
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 114 1933). Etching, 36.7 × 29.8 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 123
3.30
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 53 (March 30, 3.38
1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 34 (January 27,
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 115 1934). Etching, 27.8 × 19.8 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 124
3.31
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 62 (April 2, 1933). 3.39
Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 33 (January 27,
Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 116 1934). Combined technique, 13.9 ×
20.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
3.32 RMN. 126
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 50 (March 27,
1933). Etching. 26.7 × 19.4 cm. Musée 3.40
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Rembrandt, Sheet of Studies, c. 1632. Etching,
Blot. 118 10.1 × 11.4 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet,
Amsterdam. 127
3.33
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 63 (April 3, 3.41
1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap (first
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 119 state), 1634. Etching, 19.7 × 16.2 cm.
© The British Museum 127
3.34
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 65 (April 4,
1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 119
3.42 4.4
Rembrandt, The Artist and His Model, c. 1639. Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 95 (October 23,
Etching, drypoint, and burin (first state), 1934). Etching, 23.9 × 30 cm. Musée
23.2 × 18.4 cm. Rothschild Collection. Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle
Louvre, Paris. © Photo RMN–J. G. Bellot. 146
Berizzi. 129
4.5
3.43 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 96 (November 4,
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 68 (April 7, 1934). Etching and drypoint, 22.6 ×
1933). Etching, 36.8 × 29.7 cm. Musée 31.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 131 RMN–Michèle Bellot. 146
3.44 4.6
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 36 (January 31, Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (November
1934). Etching, 27.9 × 19.8 cm. Musée 1934). Combined technique, 24.7 ×
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 133 34.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN–Michèle Bellot. 147
4.1
Picasso, cover for Minotaure (May 1933). 4.7
Collage, 48.5 × 41 cm. The Museum of Rembrandt, The Blindness of Tobit, 1651.
Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Etching, 16.1 × 12.9 cm. © The British
Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg. Photo © 2000 Museum. 152
The Museum of Modern Art. 141
4.8
4.2 Picasso, The Death of Marat, 1934 (July 21),
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 84 (May 18, illustration for Benjamin Péret, De derrière les
1933). Etching and drypoint, 29.8 × fagots (Paris, 1934). Etching, 13.4 ×
34.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo 10.5 cm. 154
RMN–B. Hatala. 143
4.9
4.3 Masson, Massacre, 1932. Ink drawing,
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September published in Minotaure, no. 1 (February
22, 1934). Etching and drypoint, 25.2 × 1933). 155
34.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN–Michèle Bellot. 145 4.10
Masson, The Minotaur, 1934. Etching for
Georges Bataille’s Sacrifices (Paris,
xiv
1936). 156
–
xv
4.11 4.18
list of illustrations
Picasso, The Minotauromachy (fifth state), Goya, Los proverbios, no. 10, published 1864.
1935. Etching, 49.8 × 69.3 cm. Musée Aquatint, 24.7 × 35.5 cm. Hispanic Society
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard of America, New York. 187
Blot. 165
4.19
4.12 Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–1562. Oil
“Lyons kore,” c. 540 B.C. Marble, height on canvas, 178 × 205 cm. Isabella Stewart
113 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons. Gardner Museum, Boston. 187
© Photo RMN–Ojéda / Le Mage. 167
4.20
4.13 Sleeping Ariadne, Roman copy of a second-
Kore from the Acropolis, c. 520 B.C. Marble, century B.C. original. Marble, length
height 113 cm. Acropolis Museum, 195 cm. Vatican Museum. 189
Athens. 167
5.1
4.14 Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin, 1910. Oil on
Picasso, Woman with Leaves, 1934. Bronze, canvas, 100.3 × 73.6 cm. The Museum
37.9 × 20 × 25.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. of Modern Art, New York, Nelson A.
© Photo RMN 168 Rockefeller Bequest. Photo © The Museum
of Modern Art. 199
4.15
Picasso, The Minotauromachy (first state), 5.2
1935. Etching, 49.8 × 69.3 cm. Musée Picasso, “Ma Jolie”, 1911/1912. Oil on
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard canvas, 100 × 65.4 cm. The Museum of
Blot. 169 Modern Art, New York, acquired through
the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Photo © The
4.16 Museum of Modern Art. 201
Masson, Le Crucifié, 1934. Etching for
George Bataille, Sacrifices (Paris, 5.3
1936). 171 Picasso, Violin, 1912. Newspaper and
charcoal on paper. Musée National d’Art
4.17 Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1633. Gift of Henri Laugier. Photo: Photothèque
Etching, 51.7 × 40.8 cm. des collections du Mnam/Cci. 203
Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam. 175
p r e fa c e
This is a book about a number of prints and series of prints that Picasso produced
in the early to mid-1930s: his illustrations for the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the etch-
ings of the Vollard Suite, and the Minotauromachy. But it is also a book that purports
to have broader implications and to be about a good many other things—things
that are at once theoretically separate from and inextricably tied to the specificity
of Picasso’s prints. As such, the book will have to be judged somewhat less than
successful if its arguments cannot be seen as, on the one hand, arising from (and
therefore “sticking to”) this particular group of etchings, and, on the other, sus-
taining an interest that reaches beyond those etchings’ fairly limited scope.
In light of these claims, a word or two should be said about method. As
several readers of the manuscript observed (some with approbation, others more
nearly with dismay), the book does not adhere to a consistent methodology
throughout. The approach not only varies from chapter to chapter, but even within
chapters it never really attains the status of a “method”—at least not to the extent
that that would imply a set of procedures one might adopt and direct toward a
preface
whole range of objects. On the contrary, every effort was made to hold particular
methods at bay, and to address the works instead as their own specificities seemed
to demand. If the approach changes, then, with each chapter, it is because the works
under consideration have themselves changed, in some cases quite dramatically.
None of this is to say that the book is without continuity; from the start it
was driven by the recognition that the various print series with which it deals are
deeply interrelated, and that in particular they all share both an engagement with
classicism and a strong appeal to the viewer. It is to say, however, that the classicisms
and the viewers addressed by the individual series (and so as well by the individual
chapters) are not quite the same. From the Ovid illustrations to the Minotauromachy,
the implied viewer undergoes what, in these circumstances, can only be described
as a metamorphosis. The subject who emerges from an encounter with the Ovid
etchings is positioned (in a way she hadn’t been previously) to confront the classi-
cism of the Vollard Suite, just as, following that encounter, she will have achieved a
particular preparedness for the experience offered by the Minotauromachy. In this
sense, one might think of the book as akin to a Bildungsroman—except that it
narrates not so much the formation or development of the subject as it does sub-
jectivity’s dissolution. The Metamorphoses illustrations force the essentially phenom-
enological recognition that they are works given only and always in our perception
of them; as a result, they also force the recognition that we can no longer separate
subject and object (and so subjectivity and objectivity) in quite the way we might
once have thought we could. The Vollard Suite in turn suggests that all such negoti-
ations between subject and object, self and something external, are intimately as-
sociated with the workings of desire—the decentering potential of which is then
even more fully realized with the overdetermined imagery of the Minotauromachy.
There are at least two consequences of all of this that need to be stated
here. The first is that, because the book follows the story of this developing dis-
solution, it asks to be read from front to back, start to finish. At the very least it
asks the reader to be aware that something will have been lost or compromised if
the chapters are considered in isolation or out of turn.
myth and metamorphosis
1
In the Background of Picasso’s
Classical Prints
Picasso scholars long ago designated a “classical period” within the artist’s ca-
reer, beginning around the time of the First World War and ending, fairly
abruptly, in 1925. Thus delimited, Picasso’s classicism was seen to coincide with,
and therefore closely reflect, both the rise of political conservatism in France and
the domesticating influence of the artist’s marriage to Olga Koklova.1 In order
that these direct, causal relationships remain fairly self-evident, it was necessary
that scholars downplay the significance of Picasso’s later classicizing works. The
Vollard Suite, for example, was held to exhibit a merely residual classicism—a de-
layed aftereffect of the artist’s earlier, more thoroughgoing engagement with
Greco-Roman art. Picasso’s illustrations for the Metamorphoses of Ovid were sim-
ilarly discounted, on the grounds that their classicizing style had been dictated
2 solely by the poem’s subject matter.2
– In both instances the reverse seems to have been much more nearly the case.
3 As we will see, Picasso chose to illustrate the Metamorphoses precisely because of its
classical associations. After a five-year hiatus, he seems to have been eager to
Whenever I have had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I felt it ought to
be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not
imply either evolution or progress, but an adaptation of the idea one wants to express and the
means to express that idea.8
Despite the clear antihistoricism of these remarks, many artists and critics
refused to see Picasso’s contemporaneous paintings in a similar light. Indeed,
they soon assimilated his classical works to a new historicizing account, though
now one that was cyclical rather than purely progressive. Their effort was aided
4 by the fact that Picasso’s “classical period” coincided with—and to a large ex-
– tent fueled—a much broader return to artistic traditionalism in the years fol-
5 lowing World War I.9 Conservative critics, who had rather too simplistically
in the background of picasso’s classical prints
– 1.2
9 Picasso, Studies, 1920.
is realized in the fashion of nature—that is, through the grouping, arrangement, and ordered
For van Doesburg, and for the majority of artists and critics seeking analo-
gies between classicism and abstraction, the juxtaposition of the two styles re-
vealed nothing less than universal aesthetic laws. To be sure, the word classicisme
tended to carry such connotations from the start.20 Its very inclusiveness—it
could be used to refer not only to the art of antiquity, but also to the Italian Re-
naissance, to paintings by Fouquet, Poussin, David, Ingres, and just about any-
one else whose work was included in the great canon—encouraged belief in a set
of transcendent pictorial values that served as the common denominator of the
whole group. The fact that the term could be applied as well to modern art was
further proof of the immutability of those laws and their current vitality.21 But
there was more: the incipient abstraction of cubism had ushered in a new
phase—a phase of “purification,” as Apollinaire suggested—in which painting
would be distilled to its absolute, indivisible essence.22 And this painterly es-
sence, the argument now ran, was coextensive with the fundamental core of clas-
sicism, that is, with the eternal principles of aesthetics.
What enabled this improbable conjunction of modernist and “classical”
theories of art was precisely their shared basis in a “purist” ideology, itself
grounded in the long tradition of Aristotelian essentialism.23 E. H. Gombrich,
in discussing the perennial demand for an “essential” definition of painting, has
seen in it a vestige of Aristotle’s system of natural taxonomy, with its foundation
in induction and intellectual intuition.24 Observing the wealth of plant life
around him, Aristotle had discovered that many plants shared certain structural
features, according to which they could be grouped into a genus or species. Al-
though any two oak trees, for example, were bound to vary, those differences were
merely “accidental” compared to the essential features they shared. Transferred
to art, this way of thinking implied that the “species” of painting was united by
a stable set of properties common to all its members. The proximate source for
the essentialism of modernist and classical criticism between the wars—and
particularly for the prohibition against “literary painting” that they both en-
joined—was not Aristotle, however, but eighteenth-century aesthetic theory,
especially the writings of Winckelmann and Lessing.25
Winckelmann believed that Greek art, of itself, was an art of essentials,
pared of anything that might link it to the transitory or “accidental.” The status
that he passionately proclaimed for it, as a timeless standard of beauty, was thus
largely founded in his perception of the art’s own apparent atemporality. Ac-
cording to Winckelmann, the representation of movement, emotion, and all par-
ticularizing detail had been suppressed by ancient sculptors so that their work
became the very embodiment of the transcendent and universal; hence the im-
portance of the words Einfalt (simplicity) and still (unmoving, tranquil) in his
characterization of the sculptures he so admired.
Lessing’s innovation was to see these same qualities not as the exclusive
property of Greek art, as Winckelmann had, but rather as the definitive features
of visual art (for which Greek sculpture was still the paradigm). Lessing claimed
that it was precisely its simplicity and lack of movement that set a painting or
sculpture apart from works of literature. Whereas “poetry uses words, which fol-
low each other in time,” the signs employed in a painting or sculpture coexist, he
argued, in a single eternal instant. Said differently, the feature common to every
painting—the unchanging essence of the medium—was declared by Lessing to
be its own unchangingness, that is, the stasis of its elements in comparison with
those of literary works.26 Lessing felt that this fundamental, material distinction
10 placed certain constraints on the artist, while at the same time providing him
– with standards of excellence and beauty. If the essence of the visual arts were
11 grounded in the stasis of the medium, then any painting or sculpture that ac-
cepted its inherent limitations, and that displayed its timelessness in all its parts,
In Greek ethical life the individual was independent and free in himself, though without cut-
ting himself adrift from the universal interests present in the actual state. . . . There was no
question of an independence of the political sphere contrasted with a subjective morality dis-
tinct from it; the substance of political life was merged in individuals just as much as they
sought this their own freedom only in pursuing the universal aims of the whole.29
Indeed this vision of classical Greece—and concomitantly of “classical”
art—as free from the effects of the psychic and social divisions plaguing mod-
ern society persisted well into the twentieth century, flourishing with the “call to
order” of the interwar period. With the rise of abstraction, it was no longer even
necessary that artists take the human figure as their subject; any work that seemed
to imply completeness and to shun particularization was considered of a piece
with the ideals of classical sculpture. In France, the dream of wholeness and unity
such classicism fostered appealed perhaps especially to the conservative bour-
geoisie, who were anxious to deny all psychic and social division and to cast
themselves in the role of universal subjects. A more dire form of the same phe-
nomenon existed, of course, in Germany and Italy, where extreme measures
would be taken to eliminate difference and to appease the middle classes. Clearly
some such understanding of the ideological implications of classicism informed
André Breton’s unfavorable review of de Chirico’s 1925 show of neoclassical
works at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne. After the artist’s participation the fol-
lowing year in the Milan exhibition “Novecento Italiano,” which was underwrit-
ten by Mussolini himself, Breton’s criticism became particularly scathing; he
reproduced de Chirico’s Orestes and Electra in La Révolution surréaliste with the figures
aggressively defaced by several thick scribbles of ink.30
Picasso was specifically exempted from any such criticism, though by the
end of 1925 he was no longer working in a classicizing vein. The following year
Breton wrote, likely in reference to the artist’s change of interests, that “Picasso,
finally escaping all compromise, remains master of a situation that except for him
we should have considered desperate.”31 Many of the artist’s works from that pe-
riod (the 1925 Dance, for example, or the mixed-media Guitars, with their nails
protruding toward the viewer) clearly belong to the general context of surreal-
ism.32 The rest of Picasso’s output during the latter half of the decade, remark-
able in its stylistic diversity even for Picasso, is in that respect also comparable
12 to surrealist art, to the heterogeneity of its productions. (Here it is worth re-
– calling the difficulty Breton himself had in deciding whether or not surrealist
13 painting so much as existed; like everyone else, he was accustomed to seeking
definitions in the common denominators of “style.”)33 In Picasso’s case, the
– 2.1
17 Picasso, unpublished version of The Death of Orpheus, 1930.
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
– 2.4
21 Picasso, The Death of Orpheus, 1930 (September 18).
Moreover, for anyone who was the least bit familiar with Etruscan art and
in which the text is reduced to such infinitesimal proportions that its only purpose seems to be
as a pretext for the illustrations. But an illustrated book is not an album of engravings. More
than one editor has made the mistake of forgetting that the text forms the indispensible arma-
ture of the book. . . . Other editors take into account the quality of the typography in a book,
but neglect the quality of the text.9
Not so with the new edition of the Metamorphoses. There the text clearly remained
central, and its character was allowed to shape the layout of the volume. Because
one of the most distinctive features of the poem is its apparently seamless con-
tinuity—the way that one story dissolves into another, which then shades into
the next—Picasso and Skira limited the number of illustrations. In this way, the
“very extensive text,” as Zervos pointed out, was able to “unfold without inter-
ruption over numerous pages.”10 Small, quarter-leaf vignettes were fit into the
2.5
Picasso, Fragment of a Woman’s Body (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XIV), 1931.
only naturally occurring spaces within the body of the poem, namely, at the be-
ginning of each of the Metamorphoses’ fifteen books. Falling as they do at Ovid’s
rare pauses, these small etchings neither interrupt the narrative nor directly refer
to any part of it. They are not, properly speaking, illustrations, but rather deco-
rative images whose primary function is to punctuate the long expanses of verse
(figs. 2.5 and 2.6).11
22 In contrast, the full-size etchings, which were placed between or some-
– where near the centermost pages of each book, consistently refer to the events
23 and actions described therein. Even the imagery of the Death of Orpheus, which is
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.6
Picasso, Two Heads (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XV), 1931.
To provide real weapons for their mad intent, . . . [the Thracian women set upon] oxen
ploughing in the fields. . . . When the farmers saw the horde of women, they fled, leaving their
implements behind. . . . Savagely the women seized hold of these, tore apart the oxen which
threatened them with their horns, and rushed once more to the destruction of the poet.
(XI.30–38)13
Although Picasso clearly toned down the graphic violence of the event, per-
haps in accord with Skira’s wishes,14 there remain many correspondences between
the characters depicted and those described in the text. This holds true, as well,
for the other illustrations. Unfortunately, the plan to place each image near the
center of the relevant book—presumably so that the fifteen illustrations would
be evenly spaced throughout the volume—meant that several pages occasionally
intervened between the etching and the portion of the text to which it referred.15
To remedy the situation, the table of contents at the back of the book supplied
identifying titles for each of the etchings. Thus reconnected to the text, even
such apparently static (and in that sense canonically “classical”) compositions
as those reproduced here in figures 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9 acquire a certain animation.
They too become narrative images—or, more accurately, images of narration,
since they depict characters actually in the process of telling stories: Nestor re-
counting heroic exploits at Troy, Pythagoras teaching his cosmology to Numa,
or the daughters of Minyas who, while spinning yarn, weave the stories that com-
prise most of the Metamorphoses’ fourth book. One might easily suspect that Pi-
casso chose these particular figures from the myriad mentioned by Ovid precisely
to demonstrate the narrativity of his illustrations in the most literal way.
Yet the artist also took advantage of the images’ autonomy to develop a
narrative dimension independent of the written text. Even in illustrations that
closely parallel Ovid’s account of events, Picasso was at pains to create a more
purely visual sense of the action. In the face of current dogma, he sought to give
his images their own temporal aspect, by investing the figures with the illusion
of movement. Perhaps goaded by critics like Waldemar George, who, it will be re-
membered, had declared that “the poetic and ideological significance” of Pi-
24 casso’s earlier classicizing figures resided “in their fixed and immobile features,”
– Picasso saw to it that the characters of the Metamorphoses illustrations would ac-
25 tively resist any such claim.
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.7
Picasso, Nestor’s Stories from the Trojan War, 1930 (September 21).
26
– 2.8
27 Picasso, Numa Following the Lessons of Pythagoras, 1930 (September 25).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.9
Picasso, The Daughters of Minyas, 1930 (September 20).
The etching of Tereus and Philomela, and the several trial prints leading up to
it, well demonstrate the point. The brutal myth—which tells of Philomela’s rape
and subsequent mutilation by her brother-in-law16—was one of the first that Pi-
casso attempted to illustrate. In keeping with Ovid’s telling, the initial etching
(fig. 2.10) focuses on the psychic tensions of the story: the two figures are shown
presumably after the rape, each self-absorbed and silently brooding. Although
Picasso immediately began work on other illustrations, he seems to have been
dissatisfied with the composition’s apparent inaction. Weeks later he returned to
the story of Tereus and Philomela, this time evidently intent on emphasizing not
so much the emotionality of the episode as its frenzied motion.
Accordingly, his new efforts depict the physical struggle between the pair
(figs. 2.11, 2.12). In these etchings Picasso experimented with the placement of
figures, first concentrating on Philomela’s resistance to Tereus, then—through
a rearrangement of limbs—on the inevitable rape itself. The final image (fig.
2.13) manages to represent both actions. Whereas the earlier figures were fixed on
the page by clear and continuous outlines, many contours in the final etching are
broken or plural, as if intermittently registering a transient form. Tereus’s right
leg in particular is impossible to pin down. Various lines describe it in a number
of different positions, from fully extended to fully bent, with the knee resting on
the print’s lower margin. These multiple contours serve much like futurist
“force-lines”—as graphic representations of movement that, in this case, suggest
Tereus’s repeated thrusts and Philomela’s ongoing efforts to push him away.
Within the same image, Picasso created an equally powerful sense of mo-
tion through nearly antithetical means: in some places a lone contour suffices to
indicate two totally separate forms. The forward profile of Philomela’s left leg,
for example, coincides with the lines marking the underside of Tereus’s right arm
and Philomela’s own left forearm. Likewise the back of her calf and thigh are sug-
gested by a contour that doubly serves to indicate Tereus’s straightened right leg.
28 The area bounded by these lines appears, alternately, as solid and void, Philomela
– and not-Philomela. We are forced constantly to shift our assessment of which
29 part is figure, which ground, so that the illustration becomes an almost strobo-
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.10
Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (September 18).
– 2.11
31 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.12
Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).
32
– 2.13
33 Picasso, Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).
Whereas artists such as Ozenfant and Jeanneret privileged the use of line over
much more apt to scan it slowly and piecemeal. In the process, the various “dis-
placements” of her body are perceived, instead, as traces of its movement. While
our eyes traverse the distance from Polyxena’s belly to her backside, she seems to
slump and turn away; it’s as if her fall were being acted out in concert with our
shifting gaze.
The strategy is much the same in Picasso’s illustration of Meleager Killing the
Calydonian Boar (fig. 2.17). There, the right-side contours of Meleager’s body are
easily filled out to give us a frontal view of the figure; those on his left, however,
suggest a nearly profile view. The whole seems to be a kind of Mercator’s projec-
tion of his torso, which we are nonetheless encouraged to read sequentially, as
movement. Working our way from one side of the image to the other, Meleager
36
– 2.15
37 Picasso, The Sacrifice of Polyxena, 1930 (September 23).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
– 2.17
39 Picasso, Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar, 1930 (September 18).
effectively springs into action, driving his spear down into the boar and pivoting
– 2.18
41 Picasso, Hercules Slaying Nessus, 1930 (September 20).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.19
Picasso, full-plate etching of Hercules and Nessus, 1930.
perceived incompletion, would introduce a delay into the process. It required,
too, and for much the same reason, that the viewer be endowed with a comparable
integrity and wholeness: a monadic subject immediately apprehending a self-
contained object.
The Metamorphoses illustrations, however, refuse to conform to this partic-
ular logic. Through their illusions of movement they not only assert the dura-
tion and activity of vision; they also, and even more importantly, demonstrate that
the site of that activity cuts across the boundaries separating subject and object
as those had been “classically” conceived. The movements of Meleager or Her-
cules occur neither entirely on the page nor purely in the mind of the viewer. In
fact work and viewer seem to interpenetrate, so that it becomes impossible in the
wake of the perceived action to think of either in isolation, as a separable entity.
In effect, the Metamorphoses illustrations take possession of their audience (every bit
as much as vice versa), compelling involvement—that is, compelling the viewer,
for a change, to enter the picture.
In spite of his evident desire to fill the etchings with the illusion of movement
and change, Picasso avoided depicting any of the literal metamorphoses de-
scribed in Ovid’s poem. He did briefly consider including one such illustra-
tion—an image of Actaeon transformed into a stag (fig. 2.20)—but soon
thought better of it and substituted an altogether different work.28 Peculiar as
Picasso’s omission of metamorphosis imagery may seem, his response is fairly
typical of how artists over the centuries have utilized Ovid’s work. Although
there are a few stunning counterexamples (such as Bernini’s famous statue of
Apollo and Daphne), by and large visual artists have drawn on passages of the poem
that do not involve actual metamorphosis.29 The classicist Karl Galinsky has ar-
gued that, far from being ironic, this state of affairs is in fact an accurate reflec-
tion of Ovid’s intentions:
42
– In contrast to the metamorphosis poets who preceded him, Ovid included many myths which
43 were only tangentially connected with a metamorphosis. . . . This, and the sheer number of
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.20
Picasso, unpublished etching of Actaeon Transformed into a Stag, 1930 (September 20).
myths told by him (more than 250), indicate that his concern, to which the role of the Meta-
morphoses in the later literary and cultural tradition is eloquent testimony, was myth and
not merely metamorphosis. Ovid’s aim in the Metamorphoses was to come to grips with
and reshape myth, Greek myth in particular. Briefly, we might say that he was concerned with
the metamorphosis of myth rather than mythological metamorphosis.30
Much the same point—that Ovid’s principal concern was with the reshap-
ing of earlier mythological material—had been made by Georges Lafaye in the
introduction to his French translation of the poem (the translation that Picasso
and Skira chose for their own, illustrated edition of the text). “One cannot
doubt,” Lafaye wrote,
that the intention and the originality of Ovid lay precisely in the fact that, on the canvas pro-
vided him by Nicander or some other [Greek mythographer], he freely embroidered extended
compositions, in which he could display all the resources of his ingenious mind. Nor should
we forget that, along with narratives inspired by Homer, Sophocles, or Euripides, he interwove
many others whose models, for the most part lost to us today, were furnished to him by the
masters of the Alexandrian school; everything in the Metamorphoses that recalls romance
poetry, idylls, and elegies comes from this source.31
In short, Lafaye’s commentary implied that the poem was itself a masterpiece of
metamorphosis, its marvelous “originality” most evident in its complex indebt-
edness to the past.
As we will see, the same could be said of Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustra-
tions. Among the final prints there are no images of actual transformation, yet
there are numerous traces of the transformation of others’ images. Picasso would
later claim that, to a greater or lesser extent, that practice was always a part of his
art-making. “At the inception of each picture,” he would say, “someone is work-
44 ing with me. Towards the end, I have a feeling of having worked all by myself and
– without a collaborator.”32 In the case of the Metamorphoses illustrations, the trans-
45 formations were so complete that the “collaborative” nature of the project seems
to have gone thoroughly unremarked until now, the identity of Picasso’s princi-
it would be difficult to account for this particular choice of arms. The text is very
clear: Procris, spying on her husband in the woods, was mistaken for an animal
and killed with the javelin (in the French text, it is le javelot) that she herself had
earlier given him. The real culprit here seems to have been Symons who, looking
only at Rubens’s sketch, translated its all-too-cursorily rendered javelin into a
46 finely detailed arrow. Picasso, although almost certainly familiar with Ovid’s ac-
– count, chose to follow suit. Hence his Procris clutches at an arrow in her chest,
47 and his Cephalus prominently holds out a bow.
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.22
P. Symons, Procris and Cephalus, 1637.
With almost every other aspect of the composition, Picasso took great lib-
erties. Except for the incongruous arrow and Cephalus’s extended left arm—and
perhaps also the shrubbery behind which Procris was hidden—he retained little
from the earlier paintings. Their style, too, was completely transformed in the
translation to etching.38 Yet despite the extent of these changes, Rubens’s work
was evidently crucial to the project. Indeed the few remaining vestiges of the
Torre de la Parada Procris and Cephalus are all the more significant because they are
48
– 2.23
49 Picasso, Procris and Cephalus, 1930 (September 18).
so few. Additional references would only have weakened their testimony to the
– 2.24
51 Picasso, The Fall of Phaethon, 1930 (September 20).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
– 2.27
55 Picasso, The Death of Eurydice, 1930 (October 11).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.28
Rubens, Cadmus and Minerva, 1636.
lifted out of context and spun round 180 degrees, they became the basis for the
illustration of a completely different myth (fig. 2.29). The title given to that il-
lustration, The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, is actually a mis-
nomer, as there was no combat between the two men in Ovid’s telling of the story.
Before they could even exchange blows, Perseus brought out the Gorgon’s head,
turning Phineus (and all of his remaining comrades) to stone. Picasso’s illustra-
tion must have been meant to represent instead the bloodier confrontation be-
tween Perseus’s and Phineus’s men, in which—among more conventional
slayings—Lycormas knocked over and killed Pettalus with a metal bar that he
brought “crashing down on the bones of Pettalus’ neck” (V.121). Picasso, dis-
covering an improbable echo of that battle in a corner of the Cadmus and Minerva,
ingeniously reenlisted Rubens’s warriors for his own illustration, modifying
them to suit.
56
– 2.29
57 Picasso, The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, 1930 (September 21).
With Picasso’s illustration for the first book of the Metamorphoses, his so-
Who would have believed what followed, did not ancient tradition bear witness to it? The
stones began to lose their hardness and rigidity, and after a little, grew soft. Then, once soft-
ened, they acquired a definite shape. When they had grown in size, and developed a tenderer
nature, a certain likeness to a human form could be seen, though it was still not clear: they
were like marble images, begun but not yet chiselled out, or like unfinished statues. . . . In a
brief space of time, thanks to the divine will of the gods, the stones thrown from male hands
took on the appearance of men, while from those the woman threw, women were recreated.
(I.401–413)
Picasso’s illustration, however, shows nothing of the sort. There is no old cou-
ple, nor a single stone. In place of the latter we find children, begat (to all appear-
ances) in the usual way. The explanation is not to be found within the text at all,
but rather with Rubens’s illustration for the Torre de la Parada (fig. 2.31).
As it turns out, Rubens’s image is itself descended from an earlier repre-
sentation of the myth, namely Peruzzi’s fresco of Deucalion and Pyrrha from the
Villa Farnesina in Rome (fig. 2.32).44 Rubens took over Peruzzi’s figures of Deu-
calion and Pyrrha almost directly, though he exchanged their positions in the
transfer; in his painting, it is the old woman who occupies the immediate fore-
ground, with the old man behind. Peruzzi’s landscape, and the general distribu-
tion of figures within it, likewise found their way into Rubens’s composition. The
most significant difference between the two works is in the representation of
58
– 2.30
59 Picasso, Deucalion and Pyrrha Creating a New Human Race, 1930 (September 20).
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.31
Rubens, Deucalion and Pyrrha, 1636.
Deucalion and Pyrrha’s “offspring.” In Peruzzi’s image, the women grown from
the rocks thrown by Pyrrha are joined together in one large sisterly embrace,
while Deucalion’s newly created men similarly acknowledge their fraternity.
Rubens, however, put an end to this sexual segregation. As Julius Held has
pointed out, Rubens’s sketch makes clear that the metamorphosis of stones into
people was a singular event, never to be repeated; after those initial transforma-
tions, the normal processes of procreation would resume.45 Here the man born
from Deucalion’s first stone and the woman created from Pyrrha’s turn to each
other as lovers. The next pair, presumably, will do the same.
Picasso’s highly selective borrowing from, and transformation of, the Torre
de la Parada composition suggests that he was well aware of the artistic metamor-
phosis it had already undergone. Omitting all scenery, and even the seemingly
2.32
Peruzzi, Deucalion and Pyrrha, c. 1516.
We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that
this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various
games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of
them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking;
and these likenesses overlap.46
Over the next few years Wittgenstein would continue to develop his “fam-
ily resemblance” analogy, but the central point remained the same: the individual
members of any nominal “family” have no single trait common to them all, but
rather each participate in a network of overlapping similarities. Picasso’s illus-
tration of Deucalion and Pyrrha makes much the same point, though it takes the
argument a step further. By completely doing away with every element that
appeared in both of the earlier compositions—the landscape, the temple, the old
couple themselves—Picasso graphically demonstrated how it was possible for
things (here, his and Peruzzi’s images) to have no features in common and yet
(because each was clearly related to Rubens’s painting) to be members of the
same “family.”
The larger lesson to be gleaned from Picasso’s Deucalion and Pyrrha illustra-
tion is that artistic tradition—including and perhaps even especially the classi-
cal tradition—is nothing more (nor less) than a set of works bound together by
“family resemblances.” Recalling that the “family” of Deucalion and Pyrrha images
(like the “family” in the myth) is the product of transformation, we might
phrase the lesson this way: Whereas tradition is frequently seen as the repository
of aesthetic essences (the perceived presence of those essences being both what
elevates the individual work to inclusion within the Grand Tradition and what
ties all such works together as a tradition), the sequence of Deucalion and Pyrrha
compositions asks that we think of tradition instead as metamorphosis, here un-
derstood to be (like the metamorphosis of stones into people) an instance of
continuity without essence, and thus with the potential for thoroughgoing change.47
Seeing tradition in this way has important implications as well for the per-
ception of the individual works comprising it. Divested of their pretense to a
common essence, the works each also forfeit their claims to unity and indivisible
wholeness. As Leonard Barkan has remarked, “such is the heritage of metamor-
phosis; it is an image of simultaneous but divisible multiplicity.”48
Picasso’s illustration of Vertumnus and Pomona (fig. 2.33) allows us to see
with unusual clarity something of this “simultaneous multiplicity.” Its compo-
sition is the product of a marriage of Rubens’s illustration of that same myth
(fig. 2.34) to the Torre de la Parada Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 2.35), whose vertical
format and tighter concentration on the intimacy of its couple’s encounter
are prominent features of Picasso’s etching. Visible in the etching, too, is a pos-
sible relationship to another image of Ariadne and Bacchus (or Dionysus), from
a well-known Greek vase by the Meleager Painter (fig. 2.36).49 All three works
seem to have contributed to the form of Picasso’s Pomona—though in the case
62 of the Greek kylix it would have been the male figure that provided the primary
– inspiration. Perhaps Picasso recognized in the posture of the wine-drunk god an
63 apt expression of Pomona’s growing emotional intoxication, and so borrowed it
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.33
Picasso, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1930 (September 23).
2.34
Rubens, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1636.
for his own composition.50 To that general form, he added aspects of Rubens’s
Pomona and Ariadne; in each case, he seems to have been drawn to the ambiva-
lence of the woman’s pose, which makes her appear both to shy away from and to
accept her suitor’s ardent advances. For his illustration, Picasso made literal the
sequentiality implied in those twisting postures. Within the frame of a single im-
age he created two distinct options: a fleeing Pomona, and one who has at last
succumbed to Vertumnus’s appeal. Her change of attitude depends, in a sense,
on us, and on which of the two possible right legs we assign to her—the other
64 going by default to Vertumnus, who either lags behind or overtakes Pomona ac-
– cording to our decision. Shifting restlessly between options, we witness a gen-
65
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
uinely moving scene of seduction, as Vertumnus attempts to win over the occa-
sionally distant goddess.
Picasso may have been thinking of yet one other image as he worked on this
particular illustration. The sculptor Aristide Maillol had exhibited, to great ac-
claim, a bronze statue of Pomona at the 1922 Salon (fig. 2.37). If Picasso had this
work in mind, however, it was clearly as a counterexample, for it is the near-
antithesis of the Metamorphoses etching. In contrast to Picasso’s Pomona, the
66 sculpted figure appears rigidly impassive. Her one bent knee does provide some
– semblance of animation—casting her hips into a gentle sway—but her feet re-
67 main planted firmly side by side, and her forearms are held out at near-perfect
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid
2.37
Aristide Maillol, Pomona, 1910.
right angles from her torso. The goddess’s gaze is likewise directed virtually
straight ahead, as if to convey her initial solitariness and inaccessibility. Whereas
we receive Picasso’s Pomona as a figure continually in flux, Maillol’s statue ap-
pears static and totally separate from the surrounding environment.
Not surprisingly, one of Maillol’s staunchest supporters was Waldemar
George, the critic who had admired (for largely ideological reasons) the “fixed
and immobile features” of Picasso’s classicizing figures of the 1920s.51 George’s
admiration for Maillol remained firm throughout the artist’s career; his praise of
Picasso, however, turned to open contempt once “fixedness” and “immobility”
were no longer evident in his art. Writing in the spring of 1931, shortly after the
completion of the Metamorphoses illustrations, George declared that Picasso was
producing “art that was out of touch with the constants of European art,” and he
went on to warn that it was only by dint of these “constants” that “the white race
assures itself of its identity and survival in history.”52
Even for those less reactionary than George, Picasso’s apparent disregard
for the “constants” of the European tradition was a disturbing aspect of his art.
To the critics and artists who viewed tradition as the preserve of aesthetic
essences, and who believed that the works comprising it were or should be or-
ganically unified wholes, Picasso’s highly selective and idiosyncratic appropria-
tion of the past seemed almost immoral. Van Doesburg had condemned such
practice as “ransacking”; “pillage” was the term used by Robert Delaunay. Tak-
ing Picasso’s art as the prime example of the phenomenon, Delaunay located the
root of its evil in the artist’s egoism:
Exaggerated individualism leads to pillage. The desire for quick self-glorification prevents
certain artists from spontaneously deriving the form of their art from the fundamental laws
and encourages them, as a result, to take the easier and more expedient route, by searching the
work of others for useful types. . . . It is this continuity in pillage that individualists dare to
call “tradition.”53
Prior to 1930 Picasso had been, at most, an occasional printmaker. But his in-
volvement with the Metamorphoses seems to have fired his interest in the medium,
to the extent that, before he had even completed the Ovid illustrations, he began
work on another series of prints, more ambitious than any he had undertaken so
far. This time there was no accompanying poem or story, no pretext beyond the
prints themselves. Yet there were plenty of them. By the completion of printing
in 1939, Picasso’s Vollard Suite, as the new project came to be known, had ex-
panded to a full one hundred plates. Clearly here was a “work” that could not be
viewed in the blink of an eye, a “work” whose sheer bulk forcefully asserted the
temporal duration of both its making and its viewing. Perhaps even more strik-
ing than the number of plates, though, was their great diversity. The series in-
cluded examples of etching and drypoint, sugar-lift aquatint, and improvised
70 techniques of an even more experimental nature. In addition to the many overtly
– classicizing images, there were other prints covering a broad range of subjects
71 and styles—everything from a fantastic monster drawn in oddly elegant, calli-
graphic flourishes to scenes of frenzied lovemaking rendered with slashing lines
Despite its inherent limitations, Bolliger’s publication still offers the most con-
venient starting point for any discussion of the Suite’s complex “architecture.”4
By and large, the book’s thematic groupings do reflect actual similarities among
the plates, even if (as will become increasingly clear) those similarities are not
exhaustive. Moreover, Bolliger himself admitted—and even attempted to correct
for—some of the inadequacies of his chosen format. In the introduction to the
book, he acknowledged that his classifications were “somewhat arbitrary” and
that the “miscellaneous” images, at least, were not so distinct from the others as
his layout perhaps made them appear. “Among the 27 sheets that are not included
in any of the cycles,” he wrote,
there are a few that could easily be connected with one of the main themes. Obviously the tippler
at the left of sheet 12 [fig. 3.1], with its jocose line, is closely related to the Rembrandt sheets [see
figs. 3.37, 3.38, and 3.43]. The heads on sheet 25 [fig. 3.2] are probably sketches for the
bearded fishermen in the Blind Minotaur sequence [figs. 3.3, 3.4]. And in their subject matter,
sheets 6 and 7 [figs. 3.5 and 3.6] are closely related to the Sculptor cycle [see figs. 3.27ff.].5
72
– Bolliger might well have added that the old “tippler” of plate 12, with his
73 striped sailor’s jersey and Phrygian cap, also bears some resemblance to the
the structure of the vollard suite
3.1
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 12 (November 29, 1934).
bearded fishermen of the “Blind Minotaur” series, just as his younger compan-
ion seems recast as the youthful onlooker in those same scenes. Continuing the
chain of associations, we might point out, too, that the youth’s likeness is reused
for the vigilant sleepwatcher of plate 26 (fig. 3.7). Although seated, the latter
figure assumes nearly the same pose of contemplative passivity as his counterpart
in most of the “Blind Minotaur” scenes: legs crossed, elbow in one hand, chin in
the other.
3.2
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 25 (January 1934).
3.3
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 22, 1934).
74
– 3.4
75 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (c. 1935).
the structure of the vollard suite
3.5
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 6 (July 4, 1931).
3.6
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 7 (July 9, 1931).
76
– 3.7
77 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 26 (November 18, 1934).
the structure of the vollard suite
3.8
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 16 (November 8, 1933).
In fact, the more we examine the plates of the Suite, the more the connec-
tions among them seem to proliferate. We soon realize that most of the images
are far more closely interrelated than either Bolliger’s schema or even his prefa-
tory comments would seem to admit. Consider, for example, plates 16 and 17
(figs. 3.8 and 3.9), which depict a bullfight and circus performers, respectively.
Despite differences in subject matter and tone, the plates are manifestly related
in composition, style, and technique. (There are only two other instances of dry-
point within the entire Vollard Suite.) Bolliger’s placement of these two images
78 side by side among the “miscellaneous” plates was undoubtedly intended to draw
– out their many formal similarities. At the same time, however, that placement ob-
79 scures their connection to other parts of the Suite, and specifically to certain
the structure of the vollard suite
3.9
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 17 (November 11, 1933).
plates within the “Sculptor’s Studio” series. The majority of the “Studio” scenes
depict an artist and his model seated in contemplation before a sculpture of some
vaguely classicizing type—frequently a female nude or, more often, merely a
head, either male or female (see, e.g., figs. 3.22, 3.23, and 3.27). In plate 54 (fig.
3.10), by contrast, those standard types are replaced by a sculpture of three ac-
robatic youths, the centermost of whom holds a pose that is nearly a mirror re-
flection of the balancing circus performer’s in plate 17. Similarly, the statue on
view in plate 57 (fig. 3.11) depicts a charging bull and two writhing horses,
sculptural counterparts, as it were, to the corrida animals of the “miscellaneous”
engraving. Clearly these four plates form an interwoven group of images. Yet,
again, their full interrelatedness is obscured in Bolliger’s publication by the
80
–
81
seemingly rigid boundaries his thematic organization imposed. And this group’s
3.10
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 54 (March 30, 1933).
3.11
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 57 (March 31, 1933).
3.12
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 89 (May 29, 1933).
3.13
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 70 (April 11, 1933).
82
–
83
the structure of the vollard suite
3.14
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 83 (May 17, 1933).
for its images are simply too diverse, and their interconnections are not all of the
same order or kind. Perhaps the best characterization of the Suite’s complex
structure would be in terms of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances,” which
served in the previous chapter to describe artistic tradition as represented by the
series of Deucalion and Pyrrha images. Wittgenstein first introduced the notion of
“family resemblances” using an analogy to games:
I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common
84 to them all? . . . If you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
– similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. . . . Look for example at board-
85 games with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many cor-
respondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear.
Likewise the plates of the Vollard Suite form a large extended family, its
members linked through a complicated network of similarities and associations
rather than by some feature or “essence” common to them all. Of course, it was
precisely this lack of a common, unifying feature that lay at the heart of the con-
troversy once surrounding the Vollard plates. Finding no single, overarching
theme, critics tended to assume that the “suite” was instead an arbitrary collec-
tion, culled from whatever works Picasso happened to have on hand. Yet however
unusual the Suite’s complex structure may seem—and however reluctant some
dealers and critics were to acknowledge even the existence of that structure—
it is certainly not without precedent. Roughly analogous series can be found
throughout the history of printmaking, especially within the tradition of the
capriccio.8
Almost since its inception, printmaking has involved the production of se-
ries. And although many of the staple series of the early printmakers’ repertoire
(the compendia of saints, for example, or the months of the year) were organ-
ized around a single theme, others, perhaps most notably the sets of playing
cards (with their recurrent face values and varying suits), possessed a more com-
plex, “familial” structure. When, in the early seventeenth century, Jacques Callot
introduced the capriccio to printmaking—primarily as a means of showcasing
his newly developed technique of etching—that kind of complexity only in-
creased. Callot had borrowed the term “capriccio” from the field of musical com-
position, where it referred to a work whose production was guided by fantasy or
whim (caprice). His contemporary, the music theorist Michael Praetorius, de-
scribed the composing of a keyboard capriccio as follows: “One takes a subject,
but deserts it for another whenever it comes into mind so to do. One can add,
take away, digress, turn and direct the music as one wishes. . . .”9 Similarly, the
first series of capriccios that Callot produced was remarkable for its thematic
“digressions.” In fact its plates—images of peasants and bandits, city squares
and military maneuvers—were so diverse that the series’s given title, Capricci di
varie figure, seemed the only common point of reference for them all.
The precedent of Callot’s Capricci is everywhere imprinted on the pages of
the Vollard Suite, most noticeably in the latter’s own startling diversity. Yet other,
more distinctive traces may occasionally be glimpsed there as well. Because the
Capricci were intended “to instruct students and amateurs in drawing,” Callot in-
cluded prints of paired figures, one drawn in simple contours, the other skillfully
shaded (fig. 3.15). A number of similar pairs turn up within the pages of the Vol-
lard Suite: the modeled and unmodeled women of plate 6 (fig. 3.5), for example,
or the odd characters of plate 12 (fig. 3.1). For Picasso, of course, working
within a tradition never precluded variation upon it, and in the latter etching the
lines of hatching acquire a new representational significance. No longer mere
shading, they have become the knotted pattern of an old jersey, tightly curled
beard hairs, wrinkles of age—in short, features of experience as contrasted with
unblemished youth.10
Moreover, these evocations of Callot’s prints are not the Suite’s only refer-
86 ences to the history of the genre; there are also numerous allusions to the Capri-
– chos of Goya. Goya’s fantastic series of aquatint etchings was, if anything, even
87 more heterogeneous than Callot’s suite, since alongside its images of contempo-
the structure of the vollard suite
3.15
Jacques Callot, Peasant with Hat in Hand, c. 1617.
rary (in this case, Spanish) society were others drawn from the monster-filled
world of dreams. Some of that same eclecticism is preserved, for example, in the
imagery of Vollard plate 24 (fig. 3.16). The theme of the masquerade, which fig-
ured prominently in the Caprichos, reappears in the masked figures of Picasso’s
etching. (Note the radical disjunction between the heads and bodies of the two
figures at the far left, and how their hands are positioned as if holding masks in
place.) One of Goya’s fanciful creatures—a kind of seductively sociable harpy,
with the face and breasts of a woman and the body of a bird (fig. 3.17)—receives
a tribute in the plate as well.11 All of these allusions are cemented by Picasso’s use
of aquatint. Prior to the execution of this plate he had largely restricted himself
3.16
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 24 (November 19, 1934).
3.17
Goya, “Todos caeràn,” Los caprichos, plate 19, published 1799.
well over a century. What seems to have attracted him to the genre—beyond the
particular contributions of Goya and Callot—was the open-ended, impro-
visatory nature of the capriccio format. Unconstrained by the thematic consis-
tency demanded with other series, the capricious artist could give himself over
to impulse, could allow his imagination and attention to wander as they would.
The individual plates of his series served both to track the course of those wan-
derings and to supply points of departure, frequently multiple, for others yet to
come. Every suite had the potential, therefore, to be both tremendously diverse
and ingeniously interrelated—to include extended, intertwined series of prints,
in which each image was a transformation of one (or even several) that had
preceded.
Perhaps no single plate better testifies to this quality of the Vollard etchings
than number 87 (fig. 3.18). Bolliger dubbed the work Minotaur Assaulting a Girl,
evidently following a rather cursory glance at its figures. Closer inspection re-
veals that the “girl” is a girl, at best, only from the waist up. Below that, she has
the body of a horse: we see forelegs, rear haunches, tail. Although clearly based
in misrecognition, Bolliger’s reading is nonetheless one that the composition it-
self encourages. The chiastic arrangement of the figures, which relegates the hu-
man portion of each body to the lower half of the pictorial field, effectively
divides the “centaur’s” torso from her hind quarters and makes it difficult for us
to reconcile the two. The Minotaur’s form is scarcely easier to discern. Because
his back is neatly aligned with the “centaur’s” equine rump, the two sections tend
to fuse visually into a single continuous anatomy. Both of the plate’s figures thus
seem perpetually in the process of transforming themselves—from bull into
Minotaur, woman into part-horse.
In a very real sense, the figures’ apparent metamorphoses act out the tran-
sitional nature of the plate as a whole. Executed in the spring of 1933, sometime
between the first of the “Battles of Love” (see figs. 3.24, 3.25, and 3.26) and the
90 Suite’s several bullfight scenes, the plate resembles each group in a number of
– ways. Its overall composition generally repeats that of the “Battles,” while the up-
91 per part fades into a taurine landscape reminiscent of the later corrida images.
the structure of the vollard suite
3.18
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 87 (May 23, 1933).
The so-called Minotaur Assaulting a Girl provides, in effect, a bridge between the
two series. It’s as if Picasso, in making the leap from “Battle of Love” to bullfight,
left this plate as evidence of the trajectory his imagination had followed.14
In the context of the full Suite, plate 87 is particularly significant because
it demonstrates with exceptional clarity the associative and transitional—we
might even say the metamorphic—character of the Vollard prints. It does so,
moreover, via figures drawn from the cast of ancient Greek mythology. In com-
bination these two features strongly point to another model, in addition to the
capriccios, underlying the Suite’s complex, heterogeneous structure: the model of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The Metamorphoses is, of course, filled with tales of men and women trans-
formed into animals and other assorted things. Yet, as we’ve seen, the importance
of metamorphosis in the poem is far from exhausted by its subject matter. In
fact, given the relative insignificance of literal transformation to many of the sto-
ries, one might reasonably concur with those who have argued that Ovid “eman-
cipated metamorphosis from being an actual subject and made it into a
functional principle . . . operative in all essential aspects of the poem.”15 As Pi-
casso surely discovered in his own reading, the Metamorphoses is distinctive not
only for the vast number and diversity of its stories (their many different moods,
subjects, and styles) but even more for the finesse with which, in spite of that
diversity, the stories are woven together. The ingenuity of Ovid’s transitions
was pointedly brought to the reader’s attention by Georges Lafaye in the intro-
duction to his French translation of the poem. Paraphrasing Quintilian, Lafaye
gently criticized the “affectation” of Ovid’s style, “wherein the transitions
themselves are designed to score points and win applause like some magic trick.”
He quickly added, however (again following Quintilian), that “Ovid had neces-
sity as an excuse, for he needed to give the appearance of a whole to an assem-
blage of very diverse material.”16
Effective as they are, Ovid’s transitions are still not the entire story; the
narrative is also held together by a network of cross references among episodes
widely separated in the text.17 Many of these references Ovid created through the
repetition of a particular motif or phrasing. Others were provided more or less
ready-made by the corpus of Greek mythology, with its complex latent structure
of contrasting characters and interrelated events. “Myth,” the anthropologist
Marcel Mauss wrote in 1939, “is the mesh of a spider’s web and not a definition
in the dictionary.”18 By exploiting this aspect of his mythological material, Ovid
was able to produce a poem shot through with parallels and oppositions, with
links of every sort, thematic as well as formal.
92 In view of Mauss’s characterization of myth, it is worth recalling that many
– classical scholars have seen in the Metamorphoses’ tale of Arachne (VI.1–145)—
93 or, more precisely, in the tapestry she weaves—a synecdochic encapsulation of
Ovid’s own style.19 In contrast to the symmetrical, ordered, and thematically uni-
None of this should be read as implying, however, that the Suite is in fact
the realization of Bretonian automatism, the product of Picasso’s unconscious
freed from the grip of psychic censorship. (Here automatism’s critics were right:
release of that sort seems unattainable and, we might add, unlikely to yield any-
thing recognizable as art.) What does seem appropriate to say is that the Suite
amounts to an acknowledgment that printmaking—and especially the making
of capriccios—offers an adequate approximation of the automatist goal. Not
only is production relatively free from deliberation and directed control, but the
end result is a collection of densely interrelated images that provoke a sort of vi-
sual wanderlust—very much like the kind of continual, desirous displacement
of attention characteristic of the primary process.
There is, however, one relatively substantial section of the Suite within
which this displacement seems to slow. The relational frenzy aroused elsewhere
by the multiple associations among plates is calmed around these particular im-
ages, in large measure because they share a common subject matter. It’s not the
case that other, more eccentric associations among these plates, or between them
and other parts of the Suite, can’t be drawn. But those associations tend to be
overshadowed—our awareness of them repressed—by the group’s internal the-
matic consistency. One important consequence of this is that the images within
the group readily offer themselves for comparison, their shared subject matter serv-
ing as a common denominator against which differences emerge as significant.
Among the other plates, differences are too numerous and too diverse to be
thought within a single frame of reference. Here, by contrast, the differing ele-
ments tend to fall out into paradigmatic pairs—more or less stable oppositions
that we could, for example, easily imagine mapping onto the ordered, isotropic
space of a structuralist grid. Indeed, the second half of this chapter will be de-
voted precisely to a structural analysis of the images in question. With them (in
distinction from the images cathected in the primary process), the content and
proper meaning of the elements are of some consequence—as is, of course, the
fact that they all concern, in one way or another, the making and viewing of clas-
sical art.
Like any structural analysis, the following account is predicated on the assertion
that the individual elements involved are not fully discrete and intrinsically
meaningful entities. Whatever significance or value accrues to each is instead a
function of its place within the overall network of relations, a product of its dif-
ferences from other, comparable elements. Accordingly, our analysis will consist of
a series of juxtapositions—first of groups of images, then of individual prints—
whose differences seem especially significant. We will move, that is, from the gen-
98 eral to the specific, the distinctions between images becoming increasingly fine
– as we attempt to clarify the meanings put into play. The analysis will focus
99 roughly on those images that, in Bolliger’s subdivision of the Suite, comprise the
“Sculptor’s Studio” series. But it will not restrict itself exclusively to them. In
–
101
3.20
3.21
Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 7, 1927.
3.22
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 39 (March 23, 1933).
102
– 3.23
103 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 45 (March 23, 1933).
considered intrinsically sculptural. Such was the case, for example, in the Aesthet-
As much as movement, and sometimes by the same means, Rodin has sought the pictorial. He
competes for “effects” with the painters, and with the most “sensational” among them. Cer-
tainly one is able to move around his statues; but it is almost always possible to determine the
point of view from which the artist imagined them, and from which he invites us to view
them. . . . [In contrast, the work of] Maillol, a former painter, is in no way pictorial. His
sculpture appears to be anterior to painting, uncorrupted by its absences and malices. His
works ignore the spectator, or rather the position that the spectator takes in order to contem-
plate them. They are more tactile than visual, in a word, plastic.35
the wakeful male, unable to share [the woman’s] thoughts, feels shut out. It is her sleep that
precludes the knowledge of her. Her sleep, so far from offering a main chance or licentious oc-
casion, awakens the [male] to his banishment. The sleeper’s withdrawal is recognized as a de-
sertion. Which leaves [her] newly empowered; no longer defenseless game, she holds the power
of the kept secret, the power of safe and lock.40
3.25
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 30 (April 22, 1933).
108
– 3.26
109 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 31 (April 23, 1933).
the structure of the vollard suite
110
– 3.27
111 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 51 (March 27, 1933).
raises the suggestion of something more than his disinterested interest; as that’s
At the same time the person, too, caught up in the individual, restricted and nugatory inter-
ests of his desire, is neither free in himself, since he is not determined by the essential univer-
sality and rationality of his will, nor free in respect of the external world, for desire remains
essentially determined by external things and related to them.43
Especially in front of the classical work of art, whose self-sufficiency was under-
stood to ideally mirror the viewer’s own, desire had to be absent, sublimated, or
repressed.
Time and again in the “Studio” plates of the Vollard Suite, the relation be-
tween art work and audience is characterized by just this sort of pointed absence
or repression of desire. The means, however, are always slightly different, and
those differences are, of course, significant. In plate 58 (fig. 3.28), for example,
a new sculpture has been substituted for the standing nude of plate 51. The em-
bracing centaur and nymph that are its subject may be consumed by mutual de-
sire, but their passionate display serves primarily as a foil to the relations between
the artist and model (whose features their own so clearly resemble). Despite the
sculptor’s gentle embrace of his companion, the pair are made to seem both pas-
sive and passionless in the comparison. The effect is only amplified when we re-
alize that it is they, the sculptor and model, who now most recall actual works of
ancient art—specifically, the effigy figures that frequently adorned the lids of
Etruscan or Roman sarcophagi.44 The couple’s resemblance to sculpture (and
3.28
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 58 (March 31, 1933).
funerary sculpture, at that) solidifies the contrast: if the centaur and nymph seem
to be lost in their desire, the artist and his model suggest at most a kind of nos-
talgia for a passion that has long since faded and died.
Within this single image, then, we find repeated the same general opposi-
tion seen earlier, between the “Sculptor’s Studio” as a whole and the plates of the
“Battle of Love.” There is, in addition, another aspect of these two series that sets
them in opposition, and that seems particularly significant in conjunction with
112 plate 58. In “The Battle of Love” not only are the figures pressed tightly against
– one another, they crowd forward, filling the frame, thereby encroaching on the
113 space this side of the image. The result, as Leo Steinberg has observed, is that the
viewer too “experiences some of the visual disorientation which attends carnal
Plate 59 is a rare exception, however, and one whose presence within the
Suite serves mostly to confirm the rule. In the other “Studio” scenes where an
analogy is suggested between the depicted sculpture and the etching as a whole,
distance and detachment provide the common points of reference. In plate 53
(fig. 3.30), for example, the model and sculpture are again closely identified, this
time by the gentle contrapposto—the slight twist at the waist—that registers in
the left-hand contour of each figure. Once again that identification cues our
recognition of the homology between vantage points: we (and Picasso) see the
114 model’s midsection from exactly the same angle as the classical artist views his
– sculpted version of it.46 But the analogy extends beyond mere angles of vision.
115 The sculptor in plate 53 also serves as a model for the viewer’s emotional re-
the structure of the vollard suite
3.30
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 53 (March 30, 1933).
sponse to the image—or, rather, his lack of response. The classical sculptor is the
very figure of restraint, and between his legs is an evident sign of the aesthetic
disinterest that, here, seems to constitute the whole of the beholder’s share.
Another set of parallel (or more accurately perpendicular) instances of
viewing is offered by plate 62 (fig. 3.31). Here the model’s gaze provides the pri-
mary cue; by acknowledging our presence, she both establishes the analogy be-
tween us and the contemplative sculptor and simultaneously introduces into that
analogy an unsettling asymmetry. For the nude, with her fixed stare, clearly marks
her difference from the pupilless sculpture; not only is she not withdrawn from
exchange with the external world, but her appearance specifically suggests that
all such exchange will necessarily trade in desire. At once rebuke and come-on,
3.31
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 62 (April 2, 1933).
her stare makes visible the repression on which our aesthetic disinterest—no less
than the classical sculptor’s—is founded.
At this point it is crucial that we note how different these “Studio” etch-
ings are not just from the “Battle of Love” and other series within the Vollard Suite,
but also from the bulk of Picasso’s oeuvre. Art, as Picasso usually conceived it,
had nothing to do with disinterest. On the contrary, most of his paintings and
drawings seem explicitly designed for the imaginary satisfaction of desire. Where
the majority of artists constrained themselves, like a camera, to a solitary and of-
116 ten distant vantage point, Picasso sought instead the visual equivalent of an em-
– brace; hence the apparent multisidedness of so many of his figures, especially the
117 female nudes. As Steinberg has eloquently argued, to Picasso drawing was a form
of “possession” or “inhabitation”47—in either case, we might say, a kind of phan-
3.33
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 63 (April 3, 1933).
118
– 3.34
119 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 65 (April 4, 1933).
the structure of the vollard suite
120
– 3.35
121 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 61 (April 1, 1933).
the structure of the vollard suite
3.36
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 76 (May 5, 1933).
desire.51 The head, placed on the floor, eye-level to the center of his interest,
would seem to be in a much better position than in plate 61. However, the
sculpted nude, as if intentionally to block his voyeuristic gaze, clutches her knees
tightly together. The dark hatching that enshrouds the left half of the room cuts
her off even more from her would-be admirer. Similarly, the curtain drawn over
the window falls exactly between the two figures, again emphasizing their sepa-
ration and the occlusion of his vision.52
The artist and model return to the studio in plate 69 (fig. 3.37). Although
he is his youthful self again, the sculptor still refrains from embracing the nude.
(In fact, his body inclines in the other direction.) He merely stares at her across
the broad expanse of the window behind, the distant landscape visible through it
accentuating their separation. On a different plane, the window also serves to em-
phasize our isolation from the model. Throughout history, of course, windows
have often stood as metaphors for works of art, with paintings and prints typi-
cally being compared to the view through the glass. Here, as in many of the Suite’s
other studio scenes, the window seems built in as a self-reference—a reference
to the kind of image that, however inviting it may appear, nonetheless requires
its viewers to maintain a “proper” aesthetic distance. The window’s message is
transparent: look but don’t touch. And the same theme is reflected in the figure
of the model who, peering into the mirror placed at her knees, consciously fash-
ions herself as spectacle. The dark modeling concentrated on her face and upper
body suggests the concentration there as well of gazes—hers, the artist’s, and,
not least of all, our own. Only the sculpted head looks elsewhere. Lying on the
floor, a prop for the model’s mirror, he is denied even the limited pleasure of
voyeurism. Instead the head stares directly out, reminding us that we too are con-
strained to an ocular response, and one that is very nearly as detached as his.
With plate 34 (fig. 3.38) the situation changes abruptly. The sculpted
head, now fully erect, has completely abandoned his classical demeanor. His fea-
122 tures coarsened and twisted into a lewd grin, he ogles the female model at the ex-
– treme left. Her marginalization on the plate serves to center attention directly
123 on this male gaze, so that its newly charged sexuality dominates the entire com-
the structure of the vollard suite
3.37
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 69 (April 8, 1933).
124
– 3.38
125 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 34 (January 27, 1934).
position. Even the once-restrained artist is fairly bursting with lecherous enthu-
It’s all on account of that varnish that cracks. It happened to one of my plates. I said to my-
self, “It’s spoiled, I’ll just do any old thing on it.” I began to scrawl. What came out was Rem-
brandt. I began to like it, and kept on. I even did another one, with his turban, his furs, and
his eye—his elephant eye, you know. Now I’m going on with the plate to see if I can get blacks
like his—you don’t get them at the first try.53
In all likelihood that initial plate, with its cracked varnish, was not number
34, but another Picasso produced the same day (plate 33, fig. 3.39). There Rem-
brandt’s visage is clearly visible among several profile views of women, a few stray
curlicues, and sheaves of lines of varying thickness where Picasso seems to have
been experimenting with the etching needle and ink. The unconnectedness of
these elements would appear to corroborate Picasso’s claim that Rembrandt’s ap-
pearance had been an accident, the product of random scribblings. But if so,
those scribblings were clearly strokes of luck. The end result is quite similar to
many of Rembrandt’s own prints, where the artist treated his copper plate like a
sketchpad on which to try out new methods of shading, or to improvise figures
and faces, on occasion including his own (fig. 3.40). Such images could not have
been far from Picasso’s mind when, as he tells it, his scratching on the “spoiled”
plate suddenly “came out Rembrandt.”
That fortuitous event may also have been inspired by memories of other
Rembrandt prints. Otto Benesch has pointed out that Picasso’s portrayals of the
Dutch artist owe much to Rembrandt’s self-portraits of the 1630s, including the
Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap of 1634 (fig. 3.41).54 It seems possible, then, that
3.39
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 33 (January 27, 1934).
3.40
Rembrandt, Sheet of Studies, c. 1632.
3.41
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap (first state), 1634.
126
–
127
the structure of the vollard suite
Picasso’s “Rembrandt” plates—all of which date from January 1934—were part
of a tercentenary tribute (and, no doubt, challenge) to the master etcher.
While these explanations undoubtedly help to account for Rembrandt’s
abrupt arrival within the Vollard studio, they all overlook one crucial point: in one
sense, he had been there all along. Although previous analyses of the Suite seem
not to have noted the allusion, each of the “Studio” prints appears to be, to some
extent, a variation on Rembrandt’s unfinished etching of The Artist and His Model
(fig. 3.42).55 Within that one image we find much that is familiar—the prece-
dent for the selective shading of plates 59 and 69, for example, and the prede-
cessors to Picasso’s small cast of characters. Even the onlooking sculpted bust is
on hand, as are, of course, the artist and distant nude. They are likewise accom-
panied by the air of disinterest that permeates the Vollard “Studio.” In a fairly typ-
ical account of Rembrandt’s etching, Christopher White has written of the
“detached, penetrating look of the artist, measuring in his mind’s eye one form
against another, hardly aware that his subject is a human being.”56
Perhaps the single Vollard plate that most closely corresponds in composi-
tion and tone to Rembrandt’s is number 51 (fig. 3.27). Crucially, though, in that
plate the identities of the sculpture and model are reversed, with the model at
right, in profile, gazing upon the standing nude statue. Although clearly a depar-
ture from Rembrandt’s composition, this new version points up ambiguities al-
ready present in the original. Rembrandt’s volumetric modeling of the sculpted
bust imparted to it a degree of animation and substantiality lacking in the more
cursorily drawn “living” model. Yet Picasso’s interpretation of the latter figure as
a statue seems to have been additionally motivated by another aspect of the print,
one that was both cause and effect of its ambiguities. In 1910 Fritz Saxl con-
vincingly demonstrated that Rembrandt had based The Artist and His Model on
Pieter Feddes van Harlingen’s print Pygmalion; the discovery only lent further cre-
dence to a longstanding tradition that referred to Rembrandt’s own work under
128 that same title.57
– Its association with the myth of Pygmalion must have given the etching a
129 special resonance for Picasso. The artist was unquestionably familiar with the
the structure of the vollard suite
3.42
Rembrandt, The Artist and His Model, c. 1639.
story from (if nothing else) his recent involvement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As
his illustrations for that book make clear, Picasso evidently read the poem with
some care, and Ovid’s telling of the tale is its canonic version. Earlier accounts
identified Pygmalion as the king of Cyprus, who had fallen hopelessly in love
with a cult image of the goddess Aphrodite. But Ovid altered the myth, deepen-
ing its artistic significance by making Pygmalion a sculptor smitten with the
beauty of his own creation.58
Viewed through the filter of this story, Rembrandt’s etching undergoes
several important changes of its own. In the first place, the scene is transposed
from a seventeenth-century painter’s studio—presumably Rembrandt’s own
workshop—to the studio of a classical sculptor. In the second place, the distance
between the artist and the nude (herself transformed from model into statue)
takes on a completely new significance. Whereas it had been possible before to
see that distance as indicative of the artist’s detachment and disinterest, such an
interpretation becomes untenable once the image is associated with Pygmalion.
Then the space between the two figures fills with tension, their separation con-
veying the alienating inaccessibility of the nude and the sculptor’s unrequited
desire.
The Vollard “Studio” prints, as we have already discovered, tend to empha-
size (if often critically) the artist’s critical detachment. However, there are a
number of images within the Suite that seem to draw on the more dissonant as-
pects of Rembrandt’s etching in order to intimate a much closer relationship be-
tween the artist and his model. Plate 68 (fig. 3.43), for example, effects a
rapprochement of the pair via an elaboration of the etching’s Pygmalion theme.
If association with the myth of Pygmalion rendered the separation of the figures
distressingly problematic, it also hinted at a possible resolution in the eventual
metamorphosis of the statue into a living, flesh-and-blood woman. That event,
as we noted earlier, is anticipated in Rembrandt’s print by the ambiguity of its
130 female figures—by the sculpted bust’s strange animation and the equally uncer-
– tain status of the standing nude. In closer keeping with the myth, ambiguity in
131 Picasso’s print devolves upon a single figure; and the difficulty we have in deter-
the structure of the vollard suite
3.43
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 68 (April 7, 1933).
mining whether she is a statue or a living woman seems mirrored in the sculptor’s
expression of anxious confusion. Meanwhile, the tool that he holds—semi-
erect—in his hand signals his own imminent transformation from sculptor into
lover, somewhat more passionately involved with his work.59
The depictions of Rembrandt within the Vollard Suite likewise suggest an
understanding of The Artist and His Model sharply different from the usual inter-
pretations that see it as an image of “critical detachment.” As plate 34 (fig. 3.38)
suggests, with its lecherous, if also rather comical, image of the artist, for Picasso
Rembrandt represented an artist involved with his models in the most literal
sense. He once explained it to Kahnweiler this way: “Caravaggio sees the daugh-
ter of his concierge, paints her portrait and there you have Bacchus! But look at
Rembrandt—he wanted to do Bathsheba, but his servant girl who was the model
interested him much more, and so he painted her portrait.”60 The mention of
“Bathsheba” is clearly a reference to the Louvre painting (or one of its variants)
in which the Old Testament figure bears the unmistakable features—and lov-
ingly rendered nude body—of Rembrandt’s mistress/housekeeper Hendrickje.
Such paintings fueled the belief that Rembrandt, much as was said of Picasso
himself, painted the women he loved, and loved those that he painted. That be-
lief seems to have dominated Picasso’s image of the Dutch artist;61 certainly it
dominates the image of him within the Vollard Suite. In plate 36 (fig. 3.44), for
example, Picasso reworked the composition of The Artist and His Model so that the
figure of Rembrandt abandons his former position of detachment to stand hand-
in-hand with the beautiful draped nude.
Oddly enough, when Picasso showed the Vollard print to Françoise Gilot a
decade later, he equivocated on the identity of its male figure. “You see this truc-
ulent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” he asked. “That’s Rem-
brandt. Or maybe Balzac; I’m not sure.”62 In fact Picasso’s uncertainty seems to
have been even greater than his comments concede, for he almost surely had in
132 mind not (or not simply) Balzac but Frenhofer, one of the principal characters
– of Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, the book for which Picasso had provided illus-
133 trations a few years before. Like Rembrandt, the fictional Frenhofer was a painter,
the structure of the vollard suite
3.44
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 36 (January 31, 1934).
active during the first half of the seventeenth century. More significantly for both
Picasso and the dramatic tension of the story, he fancied himself a second Pyg-
malion. Frenhofer madly claimed that his Belle Noiseuse, the “unknown master-
piece” of the story’s title, was actually a living woman—both his creation and his
“spouse.” Although Frenhofer was a kind of demonic antihero in Balzac’s novella,
he seems to have held an irresistible appeal for Picasso. He was someone who
(again like Rembrandt) had managed to reconcile the competing claims of love
and art, someone for whom painting really was “actual lovemaking.” 63
That attitude alone might have been sufficient to link Rembrandt and
Frenhofer in Picasso’s imagination, yet there were other motivations besides.
When Frenhofer is first encountered in Balzac’s novella, he is described as an old
man, bearded, wearing a doublet and hefty gold chain: “You would have said it
was a Rembrandt painting, out of its frame, walking silently through the dark at-
mosphere that was the hallmark of that great painter.”64 Perhaps remembering
the passage from his earlier work on Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Picasso offered a re-
creation of sorts with plate 36. In the upper portion of that print, the figure of
Rembrandt is outlined against an open window, while below he is cut off at the
knees by the straight edge of an elaborate frame.65 He seems to be simultaneously
a living person and a painting, existing both within the frame and without. No
doubt this conceit was partly inspired by Balzac’s written text, yet the material
for its visualization seems to have been provided, uncannily, by Rembrandt’s
etching. In The Artist and His Model, the painter is placed in front of an empty can-
vas—an arrangement that may have suggested to Picasso (with but a bit of imag-
inative license) that the artist had emerged out of the painting. From there, it was
just a small step to the configuration of plate 36, in which the portrait-cum-
Rembrandt has come forward to join the nude (who, it should be noted, appears
to welcome these advances).
By reworking the motif of the artist and empty canvas so as to draw out its
134 latent possibilities, Picasso created an image directly at odds with the usual in-
– terpretations of Rembrandt’s print that emphasize the artist’s critical detach-
135 ment and disinterest. Other details of the composition were exploited in much
the same, subversive way. Rembrandt had given his sketchy self-portrait two sets
138
–
139
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4
Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs
The Minotaur’s introduction into the Vollard Suite coincided with the publication,
in May 1933, of the first issue of the journal Minotaure. Picasso had been asked
by Albert Skira, the magazine’s publisher, to produce the inaugural cover (fig.
4.1), the centerpiece of which, appropriately enough, was a drawing of the half-
bull, half-man hybrid. Given that Picasso had already collaborated with Skira on
the edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in which, moreover, the Minotaur’s story had
been recounted), and given that the artist had already produced several images of
Minotaurs,1 the appearance of Picasso’s Minotaur collage on that first cover seems
highly overdetermined—in retrospect, almost inevitable. And yet, it had been
neither Picasso nor Skira who had initially proposed the journal’s title. The idea
for Minotaure came instead from Georges Bataille (and, if we are to believe André
140 Masson, from Masson as well).2
– Bataille’s own review, Documents—a journal dedicated, as its triadic sub-
141 title proclaimed, to “Archéologie/Beaux-Arts/Ethnographie”—had folded three
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
4.1
Picasso, cover for Minotaure (May 1933).
years earlier, and no doubt Bataille was hoping that Minotaure would step into the
breach.3 Although the new journal would in fact concern itself far more with
“beaux-arts” than with either archaeology or ethnography, the recent archaeo-
logical excavations at Knossos were clearly a factor in its naming.4 The un-
earthing of Minos’s palace, with its dark, convoluted passages and stairways
leading nowhere, had revealed a Greek architecture unlike any known before; it
had simultaneously lent a certain currency to the myth of the labyrinth. In view
of the image of ancient Crete beginning to emerge, that myth itself took on new
connotations for Bataille. The labyrinth became seen as the site of a decisive
turning point in the history of civilization, for it was there that the Athenian hero
Theseus slew the Minotaur, in that one stroke severing all ties to both the dark,
archaic world represented by Crete and the human bestiality incarnated in the
monster.5 Hence Bataille’s championing of the Minotaur. Like the ass- and cock-
headed gods on the Gnostic gems Bataille so admired,6 the Minotaur upset the
clear distinction between man and animal—all the more so in that its lowly,
brutish features appeared at the pinnacle of its human form, the site that should
have been the locus of the most elevated aspects of its being.7
Insofar as the Minotaur of the Vollard Suite arrived on the scene concur-
rently with Minotaure, we might easily presume him to be the same as the mytho-
logical creature envisioned by Bataille. Certainly Picasso himself was drawing
closer to Bataille and the other “dissident surrealists” at precisely this time.8 Yet
Picasso’s Minotaur, we should remind ourselves, was and remains foremost an in-
habitant of the Vollard Suite; like that of all the Suite’s characters, his significance
is a function of the place he occupies within its complicated network of relations.
To situate this Minotaur, therefore, it is necessary to return him to his native con-
text and to look first at the parallels and differences between those plates in
which he appears and the other, related images of the Vollard Suite. Only then can
we properly begin to assess his significance.
142 The Minotaur’s arrival within the Suite—and specifically within the
– “Sculptor’s Studio,” where he first appears—was prepared in a sense by the pres-
143 ence of sculpted bulls in a few of the earlier “Studio” scenes (see fig. 3.11). In
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
4.2
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 84 (May 18, 1933).
fact, a comparison of those scenes with the later “Minotaur” images (in partic-
ular, with number 84 [fig. 4.2]) reveals a great deal about the relationship be-
tween the two series. One almost gets the impression that with plate 84 the
sculptor and the sculpted bull simply exchanged roles, the one becoming a carved
classical head, the other the much more animate Minotaur. Indeed, the print’s ex-
plicit juxtaposition of the Minotaur’s taurine features with that bearded, staring
face suggests an even more localized exchange—as if the sculptor’s head was
merely displaced to the back of the room, and a bull’s grafted onto the body left
behind. The effect of this substitution is rendered most tangible in the relation-
ship of the Minotaur to the model, and, in turn, in her relationship to the viewer
of the print. Where earlier (fig. 3.11) the model’s stare had been aimed directly
at the viewer, and at making him aware of his distanced vantage point outside the
image (a vantage point in many ways comparable to that of the artist’s vis-à-vis
his sculpture), in this later scene the model has, on the contrary, become fully en-
gaged with the Minotaur. If, through her spread legs and contorted pose, she
offers up her sex not to him but to the viewer, the move seems specifically calcu-
lated to put the two relationships on an equal footing—to cast them both, that
is, in overtly physical terms. As we saw in the previous chapter, the classical sculp-
tor of the “Studio” series was most often characterized by his detached and dis-
tant (which is to say, his purely ocular) relationships to his work and to his
model. The Minotaur’s reign within the studio is characterized, in contrast, by
relationships that are much more intimate—we might even say, much more
tactile.9
At the same time that the Minotaur, through his brute physicality, is
sharply differentiated from the classical sculptor, he also stands in marked op-
position to the grappling figures of the “Battle of Love” (see figs. 3.24–3.26).
The difference is perhaps most evident with “Minotaur” plate 87 (fig. 3.18),
whose composition nearly duplicates that of the “Battle” scenes. Earlier we noted
how the “Lovers”—precisely in contrast to the figures of the sculptor and his
model—are pressed too close for seeing, how instead they shut their eyes tightly
or stare blindly into space. Vision seems eclipsed in their embrace. This is de-
cidedly not the case, however, with the Minotaur of plate 87 and his female com-
panion. Despite their proximity, her eyes remain wide open and fixed upon the
Minotaur, while he lowers his head to, in effect, pin her in his gaze.
In short, the Minotaur seems to have gained a place within the Vollard Suite
largely through his relationship to the protagonists of its two principal oppos-
ing series. On the one side, there is the detached and seemingly disembodied gaze
144 of the classical sculptor and, on the other, the unseeing embrace of his alter ego
– in the “Battle of Love.” Together these two figures articulate the poles of an op-
145 position, an opposition between opticality and physicality, or more simply be-
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
4.3
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 22, 1934).
tween vision and touch.10 The Minotaur’s importance within the Suite seems to
reside precisely in the fact that, in him, vision and touch are reconciled. In this
context, his taurine head signifies, by virtue of its brute animality, a mode of vi-
sion that is thoroughly carnal and characterized by all the rapaciousness of a bull.
The Minotaur thus represents a synthesis or transcendence (Hegel would say, eine
Aufhebung) of the opposition between vision and carnality posited by the “Sculp-
tor’s Studio” and the “Battle of Love.”
Of course, all of this pertains only to the sighted Minotaur. His blind coun-
terpart, who makes a first appearance in the Suite in September of 1934, repre-
sents instead a radical negation of that synthesis: carnal vision replaced by blind,
feeble groping (figs. 4.3–4.6). Once indicating a mode of seeing that was wed to
146
–
147
4.4
4.5
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 96 (November 4, 1934).
4.6
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (November 1934).
the physical—sight that aggressively took possession of all that it surveyed—
the Minotaur’s taurine features are, in these plates, emptied of that significance,
or rather (since, on the surface, they remain virtually unchanged), his features
have come to signify precisely the absence of their former meaning, the failure of
the synthesis they once represented. The Minotaur’s head, no longer transcen-
dent, has become merely bestial. Which is to say that, with his blinding, Picasso’s
Minotaur has joined the company of Bataille’s.
As if to underscore the point, Picasso depicted the blind Minotaur with his
head thrown back in anguish, so that his sightless eyes descend in the hierarchy
of his face, and his open mouth becomes its crowning feature (see especially fig.
4.5) In the “Critical Dictionary” that was a recurring element of Documents,
Bataille had written of just such a pose. The reference appeared in the entry un-
der “Mouth,” where Bataille set out to contrast the “architecture” of humans and
animals. The mouth, he wrote, is the “beginning” or “prow” of an animal, its
foremost (and, in that sense, most characteristic) feature. Man, however, does
not have such a clearly recognizable beginning: “He possibly starts at the top of
the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching
one’s attention; it is the eyes . . . that play the meaningful role of an animal’s
jaws.”11 This hierarchical difference is nonetheless obliterated, literally upended,
Bataille claimed, during moments of extreme anguish or pain: “It is easy to ob-
serve that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically
stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible,
an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in
the constitution of animals.”12 What intrigued Bataille in these moments when the
face is “inverted” was essentially the same thing that intrigued him in the figure
of the Minotaur. In both cases, the opposition between man and animal is, far
from being transcended, thoroughly transgressed.13
Especially in the present context—that is, within a discussion of Picasso’s
148 “classical” prints—it is important to recognize that Bataille’s “Mouth” is en-
– gaged in a dialogue, so to speak, with Hegel, specifically with a passage from the
149 Aesthetics concerning classical sculpture and its revelation of the inherent spiritu-
ality of the human form. Hegel, too, had begun from a contrast of facial struc-
In animals the mouth or nasal bone do form a more or less straight line, but the specific pro-
jection of the animal’s snout . . . presses forward as if to get as near as possible to the con-
sumption of food. . . . The express prominence of these formations exclusively devoted to
natural needs and their satisfaction gives the animal head the appearance of being merely
adapted to natural functions without any spiritual ideal significance.14
[Its focus] is in the upper part of the face, in the intellectual brow and, lying under it, the eye,
expressive of the soul, and what surrounds it. That is to say that with the brow are connected
meditation, reflection, the spirit’s reversion into itself, while its inner life peeps out from the
eye and is clearly concentrated there. Through this emphasis on the forehead, while the mouth
and cheek-bones are secondary, the human face acquires a spiritual character.15
– 4.7
153 Rembrandt, The Blindness of Tobit, 1651.
as to emphasize its apparent redundancy) that the blind Minotaur is simulta-
– 4.8
155 Picasso, The Death of Marat, 1934 (July 21).
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
4.9
Masson, Massacre, 1932.
– 4.10
157 Masson, The Minotaur, 1934.
fice and the visual arts. Before we can address that relationship, though—much
The life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself from devastation,
but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in
utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its
eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or it is false, and then, hav-
ing done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power
only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative
is the magical power that converts it into being.32
If Bataille admired the passage’s assertion that life is always tinged with
death, that a certain negativity is inherent in our very being, his attitude toward
the Phenomenology as a whole was much more deeply ambivalent. His misgivings
can be traced to the fact that the book presents itself—like the human con-
sciousness whose history it purports to be—precisely as a whole. Through a di-
alectical process of reconciliation, what was described in the preface as “utter
dismemberment” resolves itself, by book’s end, into a coherent totality. For in
“tarrying with the negative,” Spirit is eventually able to recoup all that was lost,
to sublate it and thus turn it to positive ends. Even death ultimately works, in
Hegel’s system, to the profit of meaning and life.
Bataille would have us understand that there is a fault beneath the system,
a hidden abyss that Hegel himself both saw and refused to see. We can perhaps
best glimpse it for ourselves through the parable of the master and slave (the fo-
cal point of Kojève’s course of lectures), which opens the Phenomenology’s section
on the emergence of self-consciousness. As Hegel describes it, self-conscious-
ness is the product of social interaction: one (nascently human) individual con-
fronting another. Each desires the other’s Desire. Each, that is, wants to be
recognized by that other as representing an admirable and even enviable value.
This is what Kojève means when he says that “all human Desire—the Desire that
generates Self-Consciousness—is, finally, a desire for ‘recognition’.”33 Since the
humanness of that desire is brought to light, however, only when it outweighs con-
siderations of self-preservation, the Phenomenology’s parable of the master and
slave centers on a violent struggle for recognition between mortal adversaries.
Eventually, Hegel explains, one of the combatants gains domination and forces
the other, through enslavement, to accede to his point of view. Subsequently, of
course, will come the dialectical reversal of the hierarchy, when both parties in-
dependently realize that the master’s status is contingent upon the slave; this re-
versal in turn paves the way for a moment of mutual recognition, followed by
reconciliation and spiritual advance.
Bataille described Hegel’s account of the master and slave as “blinding in
its lucidity.”34 By this he seems to have intended to pay tribute to the clarity and
158 power of the dialectic as enacted there—its brilliant demonstration of the im-
– plication of death in life, other in the formation of self. At the same time, how-
159 ever, Bataille’s language suggests that the very lucidity of the demonstration blinds
us, specifically to the abyss upon which the dialectic is founded. As Hegel sets up
I will speak later about the profound differences between the man of sacrifice, who operates ig-
norant (unconscious) of the ramifications of what he is doing, and the Sage (Hegel), who sur-
renders to a knowledge that, in his own eyes, is absolute. Despite these differences, it is always
a question of manifesting the Negative (and always in a concrete form, that is, at the heart of
the Totality whose constitutive elements are inseparable). The privileged manifestation of
Negativity is death, but death, in truth, reveals nothing. In principle, death reveals to Man
his natural, animal being, but the revelation never takes place. For once the animal being that
has supported him is dead, the human being himself has ceased to exist. For man finally to be
revealed to himself he would have to die, but he would have to do so while living—while
watching himself cease to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self) con-
sciousness at the very moment when it annihilates conscious being. In a sense this is what takes
place (or at least is on the point of taking place, or which takes place in a fugitive, ungrasp-
able manner) by means of a subterfuge. In sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies with the animal
struck by death. Thus he dies while watching himself die, and even, after a fashion, dies of his
own volition, as one with the sacrificial arm.37
“But this,” Bataille quickly asserts (now speaking as much of the Hegelian dialec-
tic as of the sacrificial ritual he has just described), “is a comedy!” A necessary com-
edy, we might add, that allows man, still rooted in nature, to successfully imagine
his passage beyond, into something like pure Spirit. All, thanks again, to the sub-
terfuge that converts (by excluding) the nothingness of death into the founda-
tion of self-consciousness and meaning.
Jacques Derrida, writing on Bataille’s reading of the Phenomenology, has sim-
ilarly sought to draw attention to the exclusions that set the dialectic in motion:
The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of mean-
ing, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irre-
versible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—here we would have to say an expenditure
without reserve—that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or
system.38
Near the end of March 1935, Picasso began work on what would become his
most famous print, the large etching known as The Minotauromachy (fig. 4.11).
From the print’s scale, its complexity, and the evident care that Picasso lavished
on the plate, it is clear that he intended it from the start to be a “masterpiece,” if
not the culmination (since that would imply a notion of development to which
Picasso very explicitly did not subscribe) then at least a sort of resumé of his
most recent graphic work. Many of the characters and concerns that preoccupied
him in the Vollard Suite resurface in its composition. Foremost among these are
not only the figure of the Minotaur but also the Bataillean subject of sacrifice.
Restored to sightedness and removed from the immediate context of the
Suite, the Minotaur now stands in a somewhat different relation to sacrificial is-
sues. More than previously, that relation hinges upon the print’s supporting cast
of characters and the multiple, even labyrinthine associations that accompany
them. Before turning our attention to these, we might first pause to recall that
the mythological figure of the Minotaur himself is a figure intimately associated
with sacrifice. Athenian youths were regularly demanded as offerings to the Cre-
tan monster—until, that is, Theseus was sent as one of the victims. And even
there, with Theseus’s victory, sacrifice can be read in the story. As we saw earlier,
it was the death of the Minotaur, as much as the deaths he caused, that made him
a sacrificial figure in the eyes of André Masson and motivated his inclusion
among the “Dying Gods” in the album of Sacrifices Masson produced in collabo-
ration with Bataille.
Given that one of the other gods in that album was “Le Crucifié,” it is per-
haps not difficult to see that the bearded figure at the far left of the Minotauro-
machy—so Christlike in his appearance, and with what might easily be taken for
a wound in his side—could also be construed as a sacrificial figure. On numer-
ous occasions, including in his Sacrifices essay, Bataille specifically invoked the
Crucifixion as an example of the sacrificial violence upon which, he claimed, all
religion was founded.46
The Minotauromachy’s “Christ” derives additional significance from his as-
sociation with the print’s other figures, most especially the three young women
immediately adjacent. The “sacrificial” status of these women is perhaps less ob-
vious but no less crucial, as we will see, to the overall interest of the image.
Through their attributes and appearance, all three women can be linked to the
blind Minotaur’s guide (see figs. 4.3–4.6). In the first plate of that series (fig.
4.3) the guide carries what is clearly a sheaf of wheat; in the subsequent plates
she cradles a dove instead. The shared point of reference between those two
things—the similarity that apparently sanctioned the substitution of a bird for
a sheaf of grain—is that both are common sacrificial “victims.” Marcel Mauss
166 and Henri Hubert’s essay on sacrifice, a text repeatedly cited by Bataille and the
– other contributors to Documents, records numerous examples of agrarian sacrifice,
167 as well as rituals in which a bird serves as victim.47 Picasso’s familiarity with the
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
4.12 4.13
“Lyons kore,” c. 540 B.C. Kore from the Acropolis, c. 520 B.C.
elements of sacrifice more probably came from works of archaic art; one thinks
especially of the Greek korai, who typically proffered to the gods sacrificial of-
ferings of birds, small animals, or pieces of fruit (figs. 4.12 and 4.13). In 1933,
Cahiers d’art devoted an entire issue to archaic Greek art, and several kore statues
were included among the illustrations.48 Shortly thereafter, comparable figures
began to appear in Picasso’s own sculpture. His 1934 Woman with Leaves (fig.
4.14), with her corrugated “Ionic” peplos and arm outstretched in offering, is
specifically reminiscent of those archaic Greek prototypes.
These sculptures in view, it becomes apparent that the girl holding the
candle in the Minotauromachy also resembles the ancient korai. Feet planted firmly
together, right elbow bent at a near-90-degree angle, her pose alone is enough to
establish the figure’s sacrificial connotations. Then, too, there is the matter of
her “offering.” Although normally interpreted as a bouquet of flowers, it appears
4.14
Picasso, Woman with Leaves, 1934.
168
– 4.15
169 Picasso, The Minotauromachy (first state), 1935.
on close inspection to more nearly resemble the sheaf of wheat carried by the first
Now Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel’s period, apparently pro-
ceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions developed by, among others,
the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics could still be associated with the most monstrous
dualistic and therefore strangely abased cosmogonies.51
170
the sacrifice for the cleansing of a leper includes rites analogous to those for the consecration of
a priest. Thus there are here two sacrifices, one apparently expiatory, and the other of com-
munion, which end up by being similar rites. Thus even these two irreducible ideas of expia-
tion and communion, of communication of a sacred [or, rather, holy] quality and of expulsion
of an opposing [sinister] quality, cannot form the basis for a general and rigorous classifica-
tion of sacrifices.55
4.17
Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1633.
the holy and the damned, victim and sacrifier. In view of the figure’s irreducible
duality, we might note as well the perfect ambivalence of his pose: under the cir-
cumstances, it is impossible to decide whether he is in fact ascending the ladder
or making his way down.
Compared to the depicted dualism of Masson’s Le Crucifié, the strategies
employed here are exceedingly subtle, albeit oriented toward the same end—
namely, the sustained failure of any dialectical reconciliation of opposites, and so
the prolongation of their “sacrificial” status. We might now consider in a simi-
lar light the torera and horse, the figures most literally central to the Minotauro-
machy. In this regard, much undoubtedly remains to be said about the Minotaur
as well. To the extent that all three figures refer to the participants in a bullfight
(particularly presented as they are, in a tight-knit group), we would do well to
consider contemporaneous references to bullfighting, especially any that place it
within the arena of sacrifice. Bataille himself invoked the bullfight on several oc-
casions; probably most relevant to our concerns are the photograph and caption
that accompanied his article on “The Sacred” when, in 1939, it was published in
the Cahiers d’art. After identifying the Torero Villalta and the bull he has just
killed, the caption explains that “modern bullfights, owing to their ritual enact-
ment and their tragic character, represent a form close to ancient sacred games.”60
Situated still nearer to our concerns is Michel Leiris’s Mirroir de la tauro-
machie.61 The essay was clearly not a “source” for, or “influence” upon, Picasso’s
print; it was written only in 1937 and not published until the following year. Yet
Leiris was, as we know, a close friend of Picasso’s during this period. On occa-
sion the pair even attended the bullfights together.62 It should hardly astonish
us, then, to discover that Picasso’s Minotauromachy and Leiris’s Mirroir de la tauro-
machie are mutually informing works. The latter not only references the study by
Mauss and Hubert, but it treats the bullfight explicitly as a form of sacrificial rit-
ual—a structured confrontation between opposing elements which, in the cul-
176 minating moments of the event, transgress the opposition on which they are
– founded, and so cross into the realm of the fully ambiguous. The torero, Leiris
177 writes, “with his calculated movements, his skill, his technique, ultimately rep-
resents a superhuman, geometric beauty,” while the bull signifies all that is “bent”
This would still only be just a contrast, an opposition, if the pass [executed with aid of the
cape or muleta] didn’t also present itself as a kind of tangency or convergence immediately
followed by a divergence (the bull nears the torero, then man and beast are separated, the cape
pointing the bull to the ‘exit’)—or rather not even quite in this manner but in such a way
that the contact, at the very instant it is about to happen, is just barely avoided, by means of
a deviation imposed upon the bull’s trajectory or by an evasion on the man’s part—a slight
swerve, a mere slant of his body, a kind of twist that he makes his coldly geometric beauty un-
dergo, as if he had no other means of avoiding the bull’s evil power than partly to incorporate
it, stamping his person with something slightly sinister—something from the wrong, the
twisted side of things, not the right.63
Pushing this rather cabalistic examination—or dissection—of the corrida to its extreme, one
could assign a symbolic significance to the very cry that the spectators raise so frequently dur-
ing the cape work in order to incite the matador to dare the left-handed passes . . . (which nor-
mally involve the greatest risk for him): ‘The left! The left! La izquierda! La izquierda!’
For it is understood that the spectators will not be fully satisfied unless the matador has taken
upon himself the entire ‘left’ aspect of the drama—drunk the poison to the last mortal
drop—before the kill, in a sacramental lightning flash of justice, restores law and order.64
4.18
Goya, Los proverbios, no. 10, published 1864.
186
– 4.19
187 Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–1562.
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
for the mythological bull, the connection with the painting remains. And still
there are distinct echoes in the print of at least one other work. With her crossed
legs, closed eyes, and the head-encircling gesture of her arm, the torera clearly
points as well to the Hellenistic statue of the Sleeping Ariadne (fig. 4.20).81 Indeed,
the odd disjunction in the torera’s anatomy—the “break” her body appears to
undergo as it passes behind the horse’s neck—seems inexplicable except as a
means of keeping those crossed legs (and thus the Ariadne connection) firmly in
view.
There are, of course, certain visual similarities among all of these overde-
termining images, similarities that are pointed up by those images’ simultaneous
evocation in the Minotauromachy. Independent of any formal likeness, though,
those works are also linked to one another, and to Picasso’s print, by a number of
indirect and latent associative paths. For example, although bulls (and bullfight-
ing) do not actually figure in Goya’s Los proverbios etching, elsewhere in his oeu-
vre they are rampant. His print series La tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux can
easily be seen as overdetermining factors in the “nomination” of the Proverbios
equestrienne for inclusion in the Minotauromachy. Here, as with the dream
thoughts studied by Freud, it seems to have been those images with the strongest
and most numerous supports that gained right of entry into Picasso’s print.
An obvious factor motivating the selection of the Hellenistic Ariadne—
again, apart from any resemblance her pose bears to that of either Goya’s woman
or Titian’s Europa—is that Ariadne was the half-sister of the Minotaur (as well
as one of the people most responsible for his death). In fact, Europa’s story, too,
belongs to the mythological cycle that culminated with the Minotaur; it was her
rape by the bull-disguised Zeus, and her ensuing pregnancy with Minos, that set
the whole cycle in motion.82
Were we to classify the Minotauromachy as a “mythological” image, it would
be less on account of its references to these specific mythological figures, how-
188 ever, than a result of its own figures’ thoroughgoing overdetermination. In his
– book Le Mythe et l’homme (1938), which grew out of the earlier studies on auto-
189 matic thinking and the imagination, Caillois forcefully argued that overdetermi-
of myth and picasso’s minotaurs
4.20
Sleeping Ariadne, Roman copy of a second-century B.C. original.
nation was the defining characteristic of myth. It was also, he felt, the reason why
most interpretations of myths—coming at them as they did from a single per-
spective, considering only a single group of determining factors—always proved
insufficient to their task.83 Most interpretations were equally at a loss to explain
the affective power of myth. On this point, Caillois set his views in strict oppo-
sition to the “archetypal” interpretations of Carl Jung and his followers. Where
Jung saw myths as operating at the deepest and most abstract levels of thought,
and felt that that was the source of their special hold on the imagination, Cail-
lois argued just the opposite. In his view, the potency of any mythological image
derived from its multiple, concrete connections to the most heterogeneous
spheres of life, connections that, in overdetermining the image, endowed it with
a certain compellingness, and even a strong sense of the inevitable.
Thus, if the figure of the Ariadne/torera, for example, seems especially
compelling to us—or seemed so to Picasso—it is not because she is an arche-
typal figure representing the most fundamental and abstract facets of our emo-
tional lives,84 but because, on the contrary, she carries with her an astounding
multiplicity of very specific, interrelated associations: to the plates of the Vollard
Suite, to works by Titian and Goya, and especially, through them, to the imagery
and ritual of the bullfight and the various myths surrounding the Minotaur.85
It is important that we recognize how very different the Minotauromachy is
in this regard from classical art as presented by Hegel (and as understood for
generations thereafter). In Hegel’s view, the classical period was that rare histor-
ical moment when form and content perfectly coincided. A work’s content, in
other words, just was its form, with the result that statues did not so much
“mean” as simply exist. The significance of the typical fifth-century sculpture,
Hegel felt, resided in its beauty, wholeness, and unity, rather than in some sym-
bolic meaning buried beneath its surface. A strong case could be made that the
Minotauromachy, with its numerous classical figures and associations, also abjures
meaning. But it does so through a wild proliferation and expenditure of sense,
instead of through any spare, “classical” self-showing. In place of a discrete sym-
bolic meaning, the print’s imagery offers a flurry of interrelated associations,
concrete and irreducible.86 Obviously, the experience it affords its viewers is
therefore also distinctly different from that provided by Hegel’s classical sculp-
tures. The overdetermination of the Minotauromachy’s imagery provokes a kind of
associative delirium, wherein it becomes increasingly difficult to discern which
connections belong to the work—and so might be considered proper to it—and
which are instead imposed on it by our own active imaginations. Whereas the
sculptures Hegel had in mind necessarily required a certain separation from their
190 viewer (in order that the wholeness and autonomy of both might be realized),
– the Minotauromachy acts to collapse that critical distance and to erode the dis-
191 tinctions between inside and outside on which it depends.
For the thoughtful would-be interpreter (and for those same reasons), the
The putting at stake of life is a moment in the constitution of meaning, in the presentation of
essence and truth. It is an obligatory stage in the history of self-consciousness and phenome-
nality, that is to say, in the presentation of meaning. For history—that is, meaning—to form
a continuous chain, to be woven, the master must experience his truth.92
But, Derrida soon adds, this is possible only under the condition that the mas-
ter “stay alive in order to enjoy what he has won by risking his life.” The entire
dialectic of the master and slave is thus oriented (unlike either insect mimicry or
human myth) toward preservation, specifically the preservation of life and mean-
ing. It is important that we hear in that term, in addition to its more overt sense,
connotations of something like a wildlife or nature preserve—a restricted area, in
other words, cordoned off for protection, within a larger, more general, much un-
rulier one. The purview of the dialectic, of logic and meaning, is, we might say,
but a bounded space within the unbounded field of mythological and “imagina-
192 tive” thought.93 To stray outside of its borders is to risk a certain dispersal, and
– thereby the loss of both meaning and self-consciousness.
193
It is in this context that we must also hear Caillois’s reference to Nietz-
194
–
195
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5
The Classical Prints in the Context
of Picasso’s Oeuvre
Regardless of actual medium, the classicism in vogue during the interwar period
was primarily a sculptural classicism, the qualities and values with which it was
most closely associated being ones seemingly innate to sculpture. There were, as
we’ve seen, historical reasons for this: views of the classical at that time were built
largely on the foundation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic the-
ory (principally the texts of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Hegel), which had been
written with an eye trained on Greco-Roman sculpture. The twentieth-century
“classical” ideals of wholeness and unity (ideals pertaining first to the work, but
implying a similar status for the viewer) were consequently ones that might be
said to be most naturally at home with works of sculpture, especially marble stat-
ues, solid, permanent, and freestanding. In contrast, the medium of Picasso’s
196 1930s classicism was etching, a medium of multiples, traditionally heterogeneous,
– and fundamentally incomplete (in the Hegelian sense that an etching, lacking
197 the three-dimensional objectivity of sculpture, necessarily relies on a measure of
illusionism). As opposed to the centeredness of the monolithic classical statue,
Shortly thereafter Picasso began producing his collages and papiers collés,
and in these works too language figures large. Not only do many of them contain
fragments of newspaper, labels, and other printed texts, but the fragments them-
selves function within the image in a manner roughly analogous to the signs of
language.4 One of the fundamental tenets of language emphasized by Saussure
is its essentially arbitrary nature, the unmotivated connection between signifier
and signified. In contrast to the iconic images of Western art, which point to
their referents by virtue of a mimetic resemblance to them, words bear no like-
ness to the objects and ideas they denote. Rather, their significance derives from
the position they occupy within the overall linguistic system (their difference
from other words), and from the context in which they are used. The situation is
similar with the pictorial signs of Picasso’s papiers collés. An upended trapezoid,
for example, is able to stand perfectly well for the neck of a wine bottle, even
though—and here is where its difference from iconic images is most evident—
were it isolated from the rest of the collage, its meaning would be impossible to
discern. In fact, so much do these cubist works emphasize the fundamentally ar-
200 bitrary relationship between signifier and signified, and their dependence upon
– context, that often an identical elements is used to signify two entirely different
201 things. In one collage, a rectangle with a semicircular indentation along its edge
the classical prints in the context of picasso’s oeuvre
brings into play shifts, slides, tensions and oscillations between the very terms that are dis-
tinguished and opposed in its categorical framework; it is as if, while being mutually exclu-
sive, these terms at the same time imply one another. Thus myth brings into operation a form
of logic which we may describe, in contrast to the logic of non-contradiction of the philoso-
phers, as a logic of the ambiguous, the equivocal, . . . not the binary logic of yes or no but a
logic different from that of the logos.10
Again, this is the same “logic” brought into play by Picasso’s classical prints (and
of course by specific mythological figures, such as the Minotaur, within them).
But its appearance is not restricted to these; a kind of mythological logic governs
all of Picasso’s classicizing images, the paintings of the twenties included, to the
extent that their function was to unravel the neat distinctions between classicism
and whatever at the time was serving as its defining antithesis. Moreover, that
logic is equally evident in the papiers collés—in the 1912 Violin, for example, in
which a single sheet of newspaper is made to signify both surface and depth, a
pair of opposing terms.11
Yet this logic decidedly does not enter (at least not directly) into those
works discussed so eloquently by Steinberg—those, produced throughout the
length of Picasso’s career, in which the presence and possessability of the figure
206 are uncategorically asserted. The existence of those works seems contradictory,
– in opposition to the rest of Picasso’s oeuvre. It is largely on their account that
207 we are forced to concede that the oeuvre has no unifying essence. Instead there
is a fundamental, irreconcilable opposition, an antithetical set of artistic visions
1. See especially Phoebe Pool, “Picasso’s Neo-Classicism: Second Period, 1917–1925,” Apollo 85,
no. 61 (March 1967), 198–207; and Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde
and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, 1989).
3. From chapter 2 of Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes (Paris, 1913); originally published
as an article, “Du sujet dans la peinture moderne,” Soirées de Paris (February 1912), 1–4. A transla-
tion appears in Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York and Toronto, 1966), 114–115.
4. “Picasso Speaks,” The Arts (May 1923), reprinted in Fry, Cubism, 166.
5. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 63ff., discusses and reproduces many of these works.
6. A modernist teleology was implicit in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du cubisme (Paris,
1912), but was even more programmatically asserted in the writings of Amédée Ozenfant and
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier); see their Après le cubisme (Paris, 1918) and Ozenfant’s
earlier “Notes sur le cubisme,” L’Elan, no. 10 (December 1916). Meanwhile, Picasso’s recourse to
a “classicism” that drew much more heavily on archaic Greek models than on fifth-century (clas-
sical) ones only served to emphasize his opposition to such teleological accounts.
9. See Silver, Esprit de Corps, and Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground: Pi-
casso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London, 1990).
10. Silver cites many examples of conservative reaction to both cubism and early twentieth-
century “classicism” in Esprit de Corps, particularly in chapters 1 and 3. See also Patricia Leighten,
Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, 1989), esp. 98–106, for the re-
ception of cubism by the political right wing in France. Among the many instances she cites,
Leighten mentions a debate in the Chambre des Députés in 1912 concerning the possible exclu-
sion of cubist works from exhibition at the Grand Palais on the grounds that the paintings were a
“dangerous” and “unpatriotic” influence on French life. In the end the motion failed, but the atti-
tudes that gave rise to it lingered on. The tendency to find direct parallels between formal proper-
ties (order, disorder, etc.) and political ideology continued; even Leighten’s book is not immune
to its influence.
12. Paul Dermée, “Un prochain âge classique,” Nord-Sud 2, no. 11 (January 1918), 3: “La peinture
littéraire ou la littérature picturale sont des symptômes de décadence. . . . Aux grandes époques
classiques, l’indépendance et l’autonomie de chaque art étaient soigneusement sauvegardées. Pas
de chevauchement ni de pénétration: la pureté!”
13. See, for example, Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan (October-November 1910),
649–651; and G. Coquiot, Cubistes, futuristes, passéistes (Paris, 1914).
14. Tériade [Efstratias Elestheriades], “L’Avènement classique du cubisme,” Cahiers d’art (1929),
452: “Le cubisme apporta une pureté nouvelle dans la peinture et réussit à fixer pour quelques fé-
condes années le mouvant esprit du classicisme. . . . Délaissant toute idée d’anecdote, tout aban-
don sentimental à l’expression dramatique ou autre, les peintres responsables de ce mouvement
adoptèrent une ligne sévère de reconstructeurs pour arriver entièrement à ce silence plastique, tout
gonflé d’élans réprimés, d’équilibre mouvant et de vie secrète.”
15. This situation would of course change when the Surrealists came on the scene. But La Révolu-
tion surréaliste did not begin publication until December 1924, and the first installment of Breton’s
“Surrealism and Painting” appeared only in July of 1925.
16. It should also be noted that the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque presented a consider-
able challenge to would-be neoclassicizing revisionists. They were far more successful in applying
the “classical” label to works by, among others, Gris, Léger, Severini, Lhote, Metzinger, Lipchitz,
and Ozenfant. See Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde (New Haven and London, 1976),
esp. 124ff., and his Cubism and Its Enemies (New Haven and London, 1987), esp. 52–62.
17. The earliest articulation of this idea—that cubist paintings were designed to render move-
ment and that, in contrast to traditional works, they were thereby able to express time as well as
space—seems to have been Jean Metzinger’s “Cubisme et tradition,” Paris-Journal 16 (August 16,
1911). See the translation and commentary in Fry, Cubism, 66–67, as well as the discussions in
Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, 25–26; and Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Cubism (Philadelphia,
1985), 31ff. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 217–218, discusses the later revisions to cubist interpretation
via its changing relation to Bergsonian philosophy; whereas Bergson’s ideas were frequently cited
to explain cubist paintings before the war, his name rarely appears in criticism after 1914.
18. Picasso transferred his business dealings to Rosenberg during the war, when Kahnweiler was
forced to leave the country. In 1917, however, Rosenberg’s brother Paul became the artist’s new
dealer.
19. Theo van Doesburg, “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” Bulletin de l’effort moderne, no. 21 (January
1926), 3:
Si l’essence de la beauté, l’harmonie, se réalise à la façon de la nature, donc par le groupement, la position et la
mesure ordonnés de formes empruntées à la nature (hommes, animaux, plantes, etc.), il peut bien y avoir de l’art
dans l’ouvrage, mais cet art n’est pas la conséquence de l’idée artistique, parce que la beauté n’apparaît pas sous
une forme directe, indépendante et désintéressée, mais sous une forme indirecte, empruntée à la nature. . . . C’é-
tait là l’art classique.
Vous devez vous demander maintenant: “Peut-il exister un art plus parfait que celui où l’essence de la
beauté apparaît complètement à la façon de l’art?” Eh bien! c’est là la déduction conséquente de l’art moderne.
20. The French term classique meant only “exemplary” or “worthy of emulation,” without any ex-
plicit reference to antiquity, until the seventeenth century. It was at that point, when works of art
and literature from other eras threatened the privileged status of Greco-Roman models, that the
word acquired its additional, more specific meaning. By the nineteenth century classique had taken
on a definite stylistic sense as well, and was used to designate certain formal characteristics (re-
straint, measure, balance) held up to praise in the academies. See Michael Greenhalgh, The Clas-
210
sical Tradition in Art (London, 1978), 11; and J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece
(Cambridge, 1972), 1–2.
–
211
21. Thus Ozenfant and Jeanneret, in the first issue of their journal L’Esprit nouveau (1920), juxta-
22. For a general discussion of this line of argument, see Green, Cubism and Its Enemies, chapter 10:
“The Aesthetics of Purity,” 158–167.
23. For a very different understanding of the philosophical bases of modernist essentialism—one
that claims to find Platonic (rather than Aristotelian) thought undergirding its logic—see Mark
A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge,
1991).
24. See the title essay of Gombrich’s Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 2d ed. (New
York and London, 1971), esp. 87. David Summers, in an article directly relevant to the present dis-
cussion, has explored the consequences of essentialism for the practice of art history: “‘Form,’
Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,” Critical Inquiry
15, no. 2 (Winter 1989), 372–406.
25. The pertinent texts are Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griech-
ischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon (1766).
For abbreviated English translations and a useful commentary on each, see H. B. Nisbet, ed., Ger-
man Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe (Cambridge,
1985), 1–133.
26. Lessing’s direct claim is that poetry is an art of time, painting an art of space. But because
throughout the Laokoon he treats time and space as opposites, “spatial” is clearly synonymous with
“atemporal.” For a trenchant discussion of Lessing’s time/space polarity, see W. J. T. Mitchell’s es-
say “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre,” in his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideol-
ogy (Chicago, 1986), 95–115. David E. Wellbery’s Lessing’s “Laocoon”: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age
of Reason (Cambridge, 1984) offers an excellent general analysis of the book.
27. The praise of unity so prevalent in the art criticism of this period can also be ultimately traced
to Aristotle, specifically to his notion of entelechy: the essence of any natural thing was thought
to govern its structural growth and development, and thus to guarantee the unity of its various
parts. Similar notions found their way into Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the philosopher argued that
works of art should also possess an organic and harmonious wholeness. Of course, the Poetics was
concerned exclusively with literary texts; in the period presently under discussion, however, no-
tions of entelechy could easily be assimilated to a theory of the visual arts as well. In fact, accord-
ing to the logic then in place, works of visual art required an even greater degree of unity than
literary works, because, unlike the latter, they were meant to be perceived immediately and all at
once. Any nonunifying element would introduce a delay into the process, thereby frustrating the
possibility of instantaneous apprehension. For discussions of the pervasive (and often detrimen-
tal) influence of standards of unity on art history and criticism, see Gombrich, “Norm and Form,”
and Summers, “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical De-
scription,” esp. 379–380.
28. Thus even modernist painting could serve as the vehicle for conservative ideology. For exam-
ple, Silver discusses the “self-consciously antirevolutionary theory” underlying Ozenfant’s and
Jeanneret’s purism (Esprit de Corps, 387–388). Indeed it could be argued that—again thanks to the
widespread acceptance of the sort of distinction Lessing drew between poetry and painting—
painting, of whatever style, was particularly susceptible to propagandistic appropriation because
of its supposed atemporality. A similar point has been made, from the opposite side, as it were, by
literary historians writing on what they refer to as “spatial literature,” which they connect with the
rise of fascism. See Mitchell, “Space and Time,” 96–98; Frank Kermode, “A Reply to Joseph Frank,”
Critical Inquiry 4, no. 3 (Spring 1978), 579–588; and Robert Weimann, ‘New Criticism’ und die
Entwicklung der bürgerliche Literaturwissenschaft (Halle, 1962).
30. Of course even de Chirico’s early works, which were much praised by the surrealists, contained
many references to antiquity and ancient art. By the mid-1920s, however, Breton felt that both the
intent behind de Chirico’s imagery and the context in which it was given had acquired a decidedly
reactionary edge. Hence the damnatio memoriae performed on the artist’s work before its publication
in the March 1926 issue of the surrealist journal.
31. “Le Surréalisme et la peinture”; the translation is from Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern
Art (Berkeley, 1968), 409.
32. A photograph of The Dance was published in the July 15, 1925, issue of La Révolution surréaliste.
For a discussion of Picasso’s various Guitars and their relation to surrealism, see Yve-Alain Bois and
Rosalind Krauss, L’Informe: mode d’emploi (Paris, 1996), 73–79.
33. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” esp. 91ff., in her The Orig-
inality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985).
212
34. Italics added. Waldemar George, “Picasso et la crise actuelle de la conscience artistique,”
Chronique du jour, no. 2 (1929), 4. Quoted in Eunice Lipton, “Picasso Criticism, 1901–1939”
– (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1975), 183.
213
2 Metamorphic Images: Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid
2. On the deliberately antithetical relation of the Metamorphoses to “classical” or Virgilian epic, see
Charles Segal’s two essays “Myth and Philosophy in the Metamorphoses,” American Journal of Philology
90 (1969), 257–292, and “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Greek Myth in Augustan Rome,” Studies in Philol-
ogy 68 (1971), 371–394; also Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (Chapel Hill,
1988), 154ff.; and Leo C. Curran, “Transformation and Anti-Augustanism in Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses,” Arethusa 5 (1972), 71–91.
3. These traits undoubtedly accounted for much of the poem’s lack of popularity during the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries. Even in 1930 scholars were only beginning to challenge Quintil-
ian’s assessment of the Metamorphoses as “faulty” epic, and the poem enjoyed little of the critical
esteem in which it is currently held. Thus Picasso’s and Skira’s decision to publish the work was
not an obvious one, and perhaps even a bit risky.
4. In fact Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular attracted the admiration of some of the surrealists, in-
cluding Michel Leiris, who discussed the poem in his essay “Metamorphosis,” Documents, no. 6
(November 1929), 333. (Picasso’s relation to the Documents group will be discussed at some length
in chapter 4.) On the surrealists’ interest in myth in general, see Whitney Chadwick, Myth in Sur-
realist Painting, 1929–1939 (Ann Arbor, 1980).
5. In her dissertation, “Ancient Mediterranean Sources in the Work of Picasso, 1892–1937” (New
York University, 1980), Susan Mayer comments on the “Etruscan” style of the Metamorphoses illus-
trations (460–461). It should be noted, however, that Picasso’s immediate “sources” were prob-
ably not actual Etruscan works but the black-on-white engraved reproductions of bronze cistae and
mirror designs included in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folio volumes of
Etruscan art; these bear a still more striking resemblance to the Metamorphoses etchings. See, for
example, Eduard Gerhard, Etruskische Spiegel, vols. 1–5 (Berlin, 1840–1897).
6. Mühlestein, “Histoire et esprit contemporain,” Cahiers d’art 4 (1929), 379: “Et ceci en fait [est]
l’expression de l’une des tendances de la force créatrice de l’humanité; l’energie expansive, en con-
traste avec la concentration d’expression qui, à travers canons et systèmes, conduit tout droit à l’a-
cadémisme, comme l’autre aboutit, par son hybridité, à la sterile anarchie (exemple: l’art étrusque
tardif ).” Earlier in the same paragraph Mühlestein had characterized Etruscan art as follows: “cet
art tardif des époques primitives est en réalité, dans l’histoire de l’art, le dernier sursaut collectif
du principe de liberté, poussé jusqu’à l’anarchie, contre le principe historiquement rigide, et il de-
vient nécessairement, en tant que contemporain de l’art classique grec, le facteur anti-classique par
excellence.”
7. A number of scholars at this time, foremost among them Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, viewed
the study of Etruscan art as having important political connotations for the twentieth century. Ital-
ian and German archaeology in particular were dominated by a quasi-Hegelian approach whose pri-
mary goal was to trace the artistic developments that inevitably culminated in the works of the
Roman Empire. The independent study of earlier, Etruscan art—based on scholarship that was ana-
lytic rather than prospective—thus became for some a kind of anti-fascist statement. On the his-
toriography of Etruscan art see Massimo Pallottino, Etruscologia (Milan, 1963), 1–21 and 288–307.
8. Nonmythological subjects are in fact exceedingly rare on the bronze mirrors. For a discussion
of their style and iconography, see Otto J. Brendel, Etruscan Art (London, 1978), 353–370.
9. Christian Zervos, “Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide illustrées par Picasso,” Cahiers d’art 6, nos. 7–8
(1931), 369: “Nous avons vu souvent des livres illustrés où le texte réduit à des proportions in-
fimes ne semblait être là que pour servir de prétexte aux illustrations. Or, un livre illustré n’est pas
un album de gravures. Plus d’un éditeur a commis cette faut d’oublier que le texte constituait l’os-
sature indispensable du livre. . . . D’autres éditeurs tiennent compte de la qualité de la typographie
dans un livre, mais négligent la qualité du texte.”
10. Ibid.: “Le texte très étendu de ce livre crée un rythme d’architecture typographique qui se
déroule sans défaillance sur de nombreuses pages.”
11. Although these small Metamorphoses etchings are both beautiful and interesting, they are not in-
volved in any significant way with either narrative or myth—the topics at hand—and so they will
not be included in the present discussion. Moreover, although it is difficult to know when, or how,
decisions concerning the book’s layout were made (letters from Skira to the artist, which are now
in the possession of the Musée Picasso, shed little light on the matter), there is some indication
that the small etchings were an afterthought, and that the full-page images (to be discussed next)
were the only ones originally intended to accompany the text. The strongest evidence comes from
the fact that all of the full-page illustrations were produced in September and October of 1930,
214
while the smaller vignettes were not even begun until sometime the following year.
– 12. See Picasso’s illustrations for the Tauromaquia of José Delgado y Gálvez, reproductions of
215 which are included in Bernhard Geiser, Picasso, peintre-graveur (Berne, 1933), figs. 139ff. Of course,
one also thinks of the artist’s subsequent images on related themes, from the Minotaurs (to be dis-
13. Passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses are quoted from Mary M. Innes’s English translation (Mid-
dlesex: Penguin Books, 1955).
14. See François Chapon, Le Peintre et le livre: l’âge d’or du livre illustré en France, 1870–1970 (Paris,
1987), 145.
15. This rather awkward situation seems to have arisen because Picasso chose which myths he
would illustrate without regard to where they appeared in the text. (The death of Orpheus, for ex-
ample, is the first tale recounted in Book XI, but the illustration does not appear until ten pages
later.) In a couple of instances, the image was displaced a few pages forward or back of center, so
as to bring it into closer conjunction with the relevant sections of the narrative. There was, how-
ever, no precise algorithm—only a general effort to reconcile the desire for central placement with
proximity to the story in question.
17. Kenneth Silver discusses the currency of idealism in French art criticism of the 1920s, in
particular the purists’ assertion that “the idea of form precedes that of color” (Esprit de Corps,
254–255). Here again modernist theory seems remarkably close to eighteenth-century aesthetics,
especially that of Lessing, who believed that the best works of art were those most easily translated
from matter into mental representation. The fundamental materiality of color (in contrast to line)
inhibited the process. For that reason, Lessing suggested in an early version of the Laokoon that it
would “have been preferable if the art of painting with oils had never been invented.” See David E.
Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon”: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984), 114–123.
18. The phrase is Leo Steinberg’s. He discusses other instances of Picasso’s “reversible,” dually
oriented figures in “The Philosophical Brothel,” Art News 71 (September and October 1972), a re-
vised version of which appears in October 44 (Spring 1988), 7–74; see esp. 55ff.
19. When viewed whole in this way, the figure of Polyxena (and not just the style of the drawing)
bears a strong resemblance to the figures of Etruscan art. Instead of presenting the human form in
the classical Greek manner—as a unified whole, its individual elements interrelated through a sys-
tem of rhythmic balances and numerical proportions—Etruscan artists treated the body as if it
were comprised of independent, separable parts. For a discussion of this additive approach to
form—what has been termed the Etruscans’ “appendage aesthetic”—see Richard Brilliant, Gesture
and Rank in Roman Art, Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14 (New Haven,
1963), 26–37; and G. Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Ausgewählte Schriften (Berlin, 1965), especially the
essay “Bemerkungen zur Struktur der altitalischen Plastik,” vol. 1, 38–83.
20. See Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria (Oxford,
1972), 124–234.
21. Our experience of the etching is perhaps better reflected in the work’s French title, Méléagre tue
le sanglier de Calydon. The English participle (“killing”) suggests a perpetual state, an event captured
and frozen; in contrast, the simple present tense of the French verb seems to convey a fleeting act,
occurring only in the “now” of our present viewing.
The full list of French titles, as they appear in the book’s table of contents, is given below.
Although the titles are rendered in a variety of grammatical forms, the number of present-tense
verbs is nonetheless striking:
(Book I) Deucalion et Pyrrha créent un nouveau genre humaine; (Book II) Phaéthon: chute de Phaéthon avec le
char du Soleil; (Book III) Amours de Jupiter et Sémélé; (Book IV) Les filles de Minyas refusant de reconnaître
le dieu Bacchus; (Book V) Combat pour Andromède entre Persée et Phinée; (Book VI) Lutte entre Térée et sa
belle-soeur Philomèle; (Book VII) Céphale tue par mégarde sa femme Procris; (Book VIII) Méléagre tue le san-
glier de Calydon; (Book IX) Hercule tue le centaur Nessus; (Book X) Eurydice piquée par un serpent; (Book
XI) Mort d’Orphée; (Book XII) Récits de Nestor sur la guerre de Troie; (Book XIII) Polyxène, fille de Priam,
est égorgée sur la tombe d’Achille; (Book XIV) Vertumne poursuit Pomone de son amour; (Book XV) Numa suit
les cours de Pythagore.
22. Nessus had promised to carry Hercules’s bride, Deianira, across a particularly dangerous river,
leaving the hero free to swim on ahead. No sooner had Hercules reached the other side than he re-
alized that the centaur had betrayed his trust and was in fact making off with Deianira. It is at this
point in the story—as Hercules discovers what has been transpiring behind his back—that the ac-
tion is joined in Picasso’s illustration.
23. 225 × 175 mm (roughly 7 × 9 in.); the dimensions of the other illustrations vary slightly.
24. The presence of marginalia on the Metamorphoses plates is not uncommon, but the degree of in-
tricacy and finish in this case is. The other instances are all either mere doodles (usually of faces)
or abbreviated studies for the main composition.
25. That the marginal drawing of book and reader appears on the Hercules plate seems especially
216
appropriate in that the 180-degree turn of Hercules’s body mirrors the turn of the page (the axis
around which he pivots being parallel to the binding of the book). In the one case the arc described
– cuts counterclockwise, in the other the movement is clockwise; but in both cases we eventually en-
217 counter both front and back.
26. Christian Zervos, “Picasso,” Cahiers d’art 9 (1934), 88: “Picasso a pu également mettre en dé-
27. On the importance of this notion to the development of modern art, see Rosalind Krauss,
“The Blink of an Eye,” in David Carroll, ed., The States of “Theory” (New York, 1990), 175–199.
28. The Actaeon etching was made September 20, 1930. A month later, on October 25, Picasso re-
placed it with another illustration drawn from the same book, a depiction of Jupiter and Semele. See
Geiser, Picasso peintre-graveur, pl. 148, or Bloch, Pablo Picasso: Catalogue, pl. 104.
29. See E. J. Kenney, “Discordia Semina Rerum,” Classical Review 81 (1967), 52.
30. Karl Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les, 1975), 3–4.
31. Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide, trans. Georges Lafaye (Paris, 1928), vol. 1, vi:
On ne peut douter que l’intention et l’originalité d’Ovide aient été précisément, Nicandre ou quelque autre lui
ayant fourni le canevas, d’y broder librement des compositions étendues, où il pourrait déployer toutes les
ressources de son esprit ingénieux. Cependant n’oublions pas qu’à des récits inspirés par Homère, Sophocle ou Eu-
ripide il en a enlacé beaucoup d’autres dont les modèles, aujourd’hui perdus pour la plupart, lui ont été fournis
par les maîtres de l’école alexandrine; tout ce qui, dans les Métamorphoses, rappelle la poésie romanesque, l’idylle
et l’élégie vient de cette source.
Earlier in his career, Lafaye had written an entire book on this subject: Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide et
leurs modèles grecs (Paris, 1904).
32. Quoted in Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York, 1971), 310.
33. Even though the connection between the Metamorphoses illustrations and the Rubens composi-
tions has not been previously recognized, Alice Doumanian Tankard makes the case that Picasso
borrowed extensively from the Flemish artist for the composition of Guernica; see Tankard’s Picasso’s
“Guernica” after Rubens’s “Horrors of War” (Philadelphia, 1984).
34. For discussions of Rubens’s work on the project, see Svetlana Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre
de la Parada, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, 9 (Brussels, 1971); and Julius S. Held, The Oil
Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (Princeton, 1980), 249–301.
37. E. Lafuente Ferrari, “Peeter Symons, colaborador de Rubens,” Archivo español de arte y arqueología
6, no. 18 (September 1930), 251–258.
38. In fact the spare linearity of Picasso’s Procris and Cephalus might be considered the polar oppo-
site of Rubens’s painterly style. In this regard, Picasso’s strategy with the Metamorphoses illustrations
seems similar to the one he adopted with his painting The Peasants’ Repast, after LeNain (1917–1918),
in which a decorative, pointillist mode was substituted for the hard-edged realism of LeNain’s orig-
inal. See Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of The Peasants’ Repast in “Re-Presenting Picasso,” Art in Amer-
ica 68, no. 10 (December 1980), 90–96.
39. The thinly veiled nationalism underlying this antithesis should not escape our attention. In-
deed the common claim of the French (heard nearly as often today as in 1930) that theirs is the
only culture in unbroken continuity with the classical past, and that France is as a result the true
heir of the classical tradition, rests largely on this schematic view of the seventeenth century.
Poussin is held to have been the lone classicist during a period when European painting was oth-
erwise dominated by Rubens and the very different stylistic impulses of the baroque. Even Apolli-
naire is on record as having said that he hoped Picasso would make “large paintings like Poussin.”
Whether or not we follow Kenneth Silver in seeing Three Women at the Spring (1921) as a fulfillment
of that wish, it is clear that by 1930 Picasso had chosen what might be considered the opposite
path—making small etchings, that is, based on compositions by Rubens. (See Silver, Esprit de Corps,
276–277.)
40. Theo van Doesburg, “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” Bulletin de l’effort moderne, no. 20 (Decem-
ber 1925), 5: “Le Baroque repose essentiellement sur le rapport disharmonieux, par la prédomi-
nance du particulier, ce qui se traduit dans l’art baroque par la prédominance des formes
218
capricieuses et naturelles et par l’exagération arbitraire de ces formes.”
– 41. Metamorphoses, II.1–328. See also the insightful discussion of Ovid’s treatment of the Phaethon
219 story in Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven and London, 1986), 34–35.
42. Ovid’s brief account suggests that Orpheus was not present at Eurydice’s death. He says only
43. Van Doesburg, “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” Bulletin de l’effort moderne, no. 21 (January 1926),
2: “Le baroque devint le foyer de l’inspiration, mais en même temps la fin de toute conception pure
du style. . . . Le baroque était un vaste grenier où tout artiste pouvait fouiller à sa guise.”
44. This identification is made by both Alpers and Held. For a discussion of Peruzzi’s fresco, see
S. J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, Mass., 1961),
400–401. Of relevance to the present discussion is Freedberg’s claim that, because of Peruzzi’s
departure from classical proportions and his strong interest in representing action, the “frieze is
almost the antithesis—and by some might be regarded as the antidote—of the exactly
contemporary tendency of classical style among the Roman masters. What is asserted in it is not
a protest against the evolution of art into the Grand Manner, but only the liberty of the artist to
think and paint otherwise” (401).
46. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford, 1969), 17.
47. That Picasso was not alone at this time in his understanding of metamorphosis is confirmed
by the series of “Metamorphosis” essays that appeared in the dissident surrealist journal Documents
in November of 1929 (see note 4 of this chapter). Like so many of the early Documents entries,
these were clearly motivated by an underlying anti-Hegelianism. In his Aesthetics, Hegel had praised
classical art for its perfect adequation of external appearance to inner essence. He admired Greek
sculpture above all other because he felt that, through it, the essential humanity of man was clearly
expressed. Ovid’s Metamorphoses posed a challenge to Hegel’s view of classicism, however, since many
of its instances of metamorphosis were ones in which essence and external appearance could not
possibly be seen to correspond—in which, in fact, their disparity was brought to the fore. (For
Hegel’s discussion of Ovid’s poem, see Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford, 1975], 394;
see also 447ff.). All three Documents authors—Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, and Georges
Bataille—extolled metamorphosis precisely for that reason: it was a phenomenon wherein appear-
ance pointed to the absence of an essence, particularly an idealized, ennobling one. As mentioned
earlier (note 4), Leiris, with whom Picasso was especially close at this time, made Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses central to his essay; see Documents, no. 6 (November 1929), 333.
48. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 32. Applied to art, the notion of “simultaneous but divisible mul-
tiplicity” is similar to Gombrich’s definition of “polycentric order,” according to which an indi-
vidual work is to be understood as “doing” any number of things at once—things that may be
otherwise quite unrelated. See Gombrich, “Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia,” in Norm and Form, 2d ed.
(New York and London, 1971), 77; and David Summers, “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Meta-
physics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter, 1989),
399–400.
49. The connection between the vase and Picasso’s illustration was first made by Susan Mayer,
“Greco-Roman Iconography and Style in Picasso’s Illustrations for Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Art In-
ternational 23, no. 8 (December 1979), 29.
50. Picasso may have followed a chain of associations leading from the grapevine-encircled tree of
Rubens’s Vertumnus and Pomona to the images of Bacchus and Dionysus where, not surprisingly
(given those gods’ purview), similar vines appear. In Ovid’s text, Vertumnus evokes the image of
the vine and tree as a metaphor for the mutual support of marriage; and that appears to have been
the intention behind Rubens’s use of the motif as well (see Held, Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens,
299). Whether or not Picasso was cognizant of these associations, his own illustration—to the
extent that it evokes the Meleager Painter’s image of Ariadne holding up the drunken Dionysus—
itself seems a fitting image of conjugal support.
51. For a discussion of George’s enthusiasm for Maillol, see Christopher Green, “Classicisms of
Transcendence and Transience: Maillol, Picasso and de Chirico,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer
Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London,
1990), 267–282.
52. Waldemar George, “Les Cinquante Ans de Picasso et la mort de la nature-mort,” Formes, no. 14
(April 1931), 56; quoted in Green, “Classicisms of Transcendence and Transience,” 279.
53. Robert Delaunay, “Fragments, Notes” (1923/24), in Delaunay, Du cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed.
Pierre Francastel (Paris, 1957), 101:
L’individualisme exagéré conduit au pillage. Le besoin de se glorifier vite eux-mêmes empêche certains artistes de
tirer spontanément des lois fondamentales la forme de leur art et les incite, par conséquent, à chercher dans l’oeu-
vre des autres—ce qui est plus facile et plus expéditif—le genre utile. . . . C’est cette continuité dans pillage que
les individualistes osent appeler “la tradition”.
220
The high degree of moral (and not merely aesthetic) indignation heard in Delaunay’s at-
– tack on “individualism” is yet another index of the extent to which artistic forms and practices
221 were invested with ideological meanings during this period. We will see in the next chapter—as
indeed was already mentioned in the previous one—that the perceived self-sufficiency of free-
1. The degree of Vollard’s involvement with the project has been the source of some debate. Hans
Bolliger asserted that the publisher actually commissioned the Suite from Picasso, though he pro-
vided no substantiating evidence for the claim. Even if Vollard’s role as initiator must therefore re-
main in doubt, the scenario advanced by Riva Castleman—in which Vollard simply received some
of the plates as barter whenever he came into possession of a painting that Picasso coveted—prob-
ably understates the level of his involvement. The fact that, after the fatal accident, Picasso added
three portraits of Vollard to the original series (thereby bringing the total to an even one hundred
plates) suggests that Picasso, at least, considered Vollard instrumental to the project as a whole.
For a summary of the several competing accounts of the Suite’s origins, see Anita Coles Costello,
Picasso’s “Vollard Suite” (New York, 1979), 1–3.
2. Picasso: 100 estampes originales was the title of Petiet’s 1973 catalogue of the Vollard plates.
Oddly, despite the controversy over the Suite’s status, neither Petiet nor anyone else seems
to have consulted Picasso on the matter. According to Françoise Gilot, however, when the artist
first showed her a set of the prints, he stated that it was “a series of etchings, one hundred of them,
that I did for Vollard.” The implication plainly seems to be that the prints belonged together as a
suite, and that that had been the intention from the start. (See Gilot, Life with Picasso [New York,
1964], 51.) A good general review of the debate surrounding the status of the Suite is provided by
Daniel Robbins in the catalogue to the exhibition “Picasso’s Vollard Suite,” which was held at the
Dartmouth College Museum in 1980.
4. Indeed Bolliger’s classifications and plate numbers have become the standard means of refer-
ring to the Vollard prints, and as such will be preserved throughout the present chapter.
8. For a brief but illuminating account of the history and concept of the capriccio, see David
Rosand’s essay “Capriccio: Goya and a Graphic Tradition,” in Janis A. Tomlinson, Graphic Evolutions:
The Print Series of Francisco Goya (New York, 1989), 3–9. The “capriccio” entry in the Reallexikon zur
deutschen Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1954), vol. 3, 329ff., also provides useful information.
10. Interestingly enough, Callot’s Capricci also include images in which a youthful figure stands
face to face with a character much older; in these instances, however, the figures display roughly
equivalent amounts of shading. See Edwin de T. Bechtel, Jacques Callot (New York, 1955), capric-
cio no. 34.
11. Of course, this plate’s allusions are not to Goya alone; interwoven with the references to Los
caprichos are others to the imagery of ancient Greek myth. The general importance of the Suite’s in-
volvement with myth will be discussed at length in the following chapter.
12. For a discussion of Picasso’s technique here, and in some of the other more complicated plates
of the Suite, see Burr Wallen, Picasso’s Aquatints (St. Petersburg, Florida, 1984), 14–16.
13. The closest comparison is probably with Goya’s “Porque fue sensible” (Los caprichos, plate 32),
which depicts a woman sitting alone in a cell lit only by the glow of a small lantern. In order to
achieve the proper effect, Goya forwent his burin to work exclusively with aquatint.
14. Of course, the plate also gestures toward—and thus appears to have served as the jumping-
off point for—the Suite’s extended series of Minotaur images. But to stop at this obvious con-
nection, neglecting the multiple and divergent “trajectories” involved, is to lose sight of the full
complexity of the Suite’s structure.
15. This is the argument made by Karl Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: An Introduction to the Basic
Aspects (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 69. Galinsky provides a trenchant discussion of the
222
structure of the poem in his chapter “Unity and Coherence,” 79–109.
– 16. Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide, trans. Georges Lafaye (Paris, 1928), vol. 1, vi–vii.
223
17. “It is true,” Sara Mack wries, “that the poem is so long and full of characters and events that
18. Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, ed. V. Karady (Paris, 1969), vol. 2, 165. Jean-Pierre Vernant, a scholar
very much in the tradition of Mauss, briefly summarizes the weblike or systemic nature of myth in
his introduction to Marcel Detienne’s The Gardens of Adonis (New York, 1977), iii:
A god has no more one particular essence than a single detail of a myth is significant on its own. Every god is de-
fined by the network of relations which links him with and opposes him to the other deities included within a par-
ticular pantheon; and similarly, a single detail in a myth is only significant by virtue of its place within the ordered
system to which the myth itself belongs.
19. See, for example, Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” 82–83; W. S. Anderson in American Journal of
Philology 89 (1968), 103; and Leo C. Curran in Arethusa 5 (1972), 83–84.
20. These precepts derive from chapters 8 and 10 of Aristotle’s Poetics. For a discussion of them
in the context of Ovid’s composition, see Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” 80ff.
21. Similarly, Charles Altieri has discussed the Metamorphoses (and several works of postmodern fic-
tion that he feels belong to the same tradition) in the following terms: “Reader, writer, and mate-
rial remain moving about in a closed system which is nonetheless in continual motion and offering
on its single uninterrupted surface, an infinite field of possible recognitions and interrelation-
ships.” Altieri, “Ovid and the New Mythologists,” Novel 7, no. 1 (Fall 1973), 32.
22. Quoted by Marie-Laure Bernadac in her essay “Painting as Model,” from the exhibition cata-
logue Late Picasso (London, 1988), 88.
23. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor,
1969), 26.
24. Max Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés,” La Révolution surréaliste 1 (December 1, 1924), 27.
25. Ibid.
26. Pierre Naville, “Beaux Arts,” La Révolution surréaliste 3 (April 1925), 27. Quoted in Hal Foster,
Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), xvi.
27. As Frued explains: “The elements ‘botanical’ and ‘monograph’ found their way into the con-
tent of the dream because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of the dream-
thoughts, because, that is to say, they constituted ‘nodal points’ upon which a great number of the
dream-thoughts converged, and because they had several meanings in connection with the inter-
pretation of the dream.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans.
James Strachey (London, 1953ff.), vol. 4, 283.
30. The customary association of the Vollard plates with the Balzac illustrations no doubt arises
from the fact that, in addition to their strong visual similarities, both series of etchings were done
in collaboration with Vollard. Moreover, although Picasso completed the illustrations in 1927,
Vollard did not release his edition of Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu until 1931, presumably because that
was the centennial of the story’s original publication. By then, Picasso had already begun work on
the Vollard Suite.
31. For a discussion of classicism in modern French sculpture, including an account of the pop-
ularity of artists such as Maillol, Bourdelle, and Despiau, see Patrick Elliott, “Sculpture in France
and Classicism, 1910–1939,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground:
Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London, 1990), 283–295.
34. “Tout ces oppositions semblent vouloir se résumer en une seule: romanticisme, classicisme.”
Jules Romains, “Maillol,” Formes, no. 4 (April 1930), 7.
35. Ibid., 6:
Autant que le mouvement, et quelquefois par le même moyens, Rodin a cherché le pittoresque. Il lutte “d’effets”
224
avec les peintres, et avec les plus “sensationnels” d’entre eux. Sans doute on peut tourner auteur de ses statues.
Mais il est presque toujours possible de découvrir sous quelle perspective de choix l’auteur les a imaginées et nous
– invite à les voir. . . . Maillol, ancien peintre, n’est aucunement pittoresque. Sa statuaire paraît antérieure à la
225
peinture, non corrompue par ses exemples et ses malices. Ses oeuvres ignorent le spectateur ou plutôt la position
Romains’s views, it should be noted, although based in aesthetic theory of the 1830s, ac-
tually represent a substantial departure from the ideas concerning classical sculpture that had dom-
inated academic training throughout most of the intervening period. Those ideas—largely shaped
by the art and writing of Adolf von Hildebrand—held bas-relief to be the ideal form of classical
sculpture, precisely because it was thought to reconcile “plastic” (or tactile) and visual experience.
(See Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in den bildenden Künsten [Strasbourg, 1893]; or the English
version, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Max Meyer and Robert M. Ogden [New
York, 1907].) According to Romains’s rationale, by contrast, the defining characteristics of
relief—its severely restricted viewing angle, its “pictorialism”—made it necessarily antithetical
to the classical ideal (which, to his mind as to Hegel’s, found its greatest expression in freestand-
ing sculpture). Without attempting to chart an entire history of attitudes toward classicism and
sculpture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we might still observe that Hegel’s case
for sculpture (based as it is on claims about the inherent nature of the medium) would have read-
ily appealed to a later, modernist generation already committed to essentialist views of art.
We should also note, although it entails getting a bit ahead of ourselves, that Romains’s cat-
egories of the “visual” and the “tactile” will be completely undermined by the “Sculptor’s Studio”
plates of the Vollard Suite—even though those plates (surprisingly) preserve much of Romains’s
larger view of classicism. For Picasso, any work that “ignores the spectator” necessarily seems dis-
tant and aloof—quite literally out of touch with its audience. To characterize such sculptures as “tac-
tile” would therefore be contradictory, for those works more than any reduce the viewer’s role to a
matter of mere looking.
37. In his Aesthetics, Hegel made much of the fact that, on most ancient statues, the eyes are either
blank or entirely missing. Discounting evidence that many of the empty sockets were originally in-
laid with colored glass and that, similarly, some of the carved eyes were once painted with iris and
pupil, he saw their present blankness as entirely appropriate to the intrinsic meaning of the work:
“The eye looks out into the external world; by nature it looks at something and therefore displays
man in his relation to a varied external sphere. . . . But the genuine sculptural figure is precisely
withdrawn from this link with external things, and is immersed in the substantial nature of its spir-
itual content, independent in itself, not dispersed or complicated by anything else” (Aesthetics,
732–733).
38. It should be pointed out that the sculpted head in plate 39 resembles, more than any ancient
or generically classical work, the sculptures that Picasso himself was producing at the Château de
Boisgeloup in Gisors at precisely this time. (For illustrations and discussion of those sculptures,
see Werner Spies, Picasso: Das plastische Werk [Stuttgart, 1983], 149–158.) Several similar heads
crop up elsewhere in the “Studio” series. In some cases the arrangement is like that of plate 39,
with the sculptor and/or model in close physical contact with the work; in others there is the same
distance between sculpture and audience as in most prints of the series. The existence of both types
of prints suggests that this general problem—concerning the relative “objectivity” and indepen-
dence of the work of art—occupied Picasso’s thought at Gisors as well. That said, we need to re-
main skeptical of any and all attempts to draw conclusions about the Boisgeloup sculptures from
the Vollard etchings. The systemic nature of the “Sculptor’s Studio” series, in which each print de-
rives its significance from its differential relation to the others, should dissuade us from seeing any
direct correlation between elements of the etchings and possible referents in the external world.
39. Other plates in the series include numbers 93, in which a Minotaur crouches over a sleeping
woman, and 27, the well-known aquatint of a faun kneeling before another somnolent nude. It
should be mentioned that there are also a couple of different permutations on this theme—such
as in plate 86, where a young (clothed) woman keeps watch beside a sleeping Minotaur.
40. Leo Steinberg, “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers,” in Other Criteria (Oxford, 1972), 101–102. In plate
26 the position of the sleeper’s left arm, encircling her head, further emphasizes her withdrawal
and complete self-absorption.
41. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, 1988),
esp. 1–4 and 131–132.
42. See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weight-
man (Chicago, 1969), as well as Yve-Alain Bois’s mention of the “transformation group” in his es-
say “The Semiology of Cubism,” in William Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A
Symposium (New York, 1992), 195.
44. Several examples of such sarcophagi, with figures posed as in plate 58, are in the collection of
the Louvre; the closest comparisons are afforded by a second-century A.D. Attic sarcophagus from
Thessaloniki, and the well-known painted terra-cotta sarcophagus from Caere. For illustrations of
these works see, respectively, Bernard Andreae, The Art of Rome (New York, 1977), fig. 101; and Otto
J. Brendel, Etruscan Art (Middlesex and New York, 1978), figs. 158 and 160.
226
45. Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria, 175.
– 46. The similarity of the two vantage points was first noted by Anita Coles Costello, who asserted
227 that it allowed the spectator “to take a vicarious place within the print by identifying with the gaze
of one of its participants.” (Costello, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” 123.) My point, however, is that the
47. Steinberg’s fullest elaboration of the artist’s aesthetic of “possession” is given in “The Alge-
rian Women and Picasso at Large.” More recently, he has modified that argument, attributing to
Picasso less a desire to possess his subjects than to inhabit them: “Inlassablement, les figures multi-
aspectuelles de Picasso semblent suggérer non pas quelque chose qui empiète sur un corps—non
pas le corps comme objet de la vision d’un autre, objet de connaissance pour cet autre, offert à sa
possession et à sa puissance—, mais le corps en pleine possession de soi, comme si l’artiste s’était
tellement projeté dans l’être de son modèle qu’il puisse y éprouver de l’intérieur sa propre intéri-
orité.” See Steinberg, “La Fin de partie de Picasso,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 27
(Spring 1989), 11–38. A somewhat abbreviated version of this essay has been translated into Eng-
lish as “Picasso’s Endgame,” October 74 (Fall 1995), 105–122.
48. Cited by John Richardson, “L’Epoque Jacqueline,” in Late Picasso (London: Tate Gallery,
1988), 40.
49. In her studies of Degas and his representation of the female body, Carol Armstrong uses Pi-
casso’s art as the example of greatest contrast. With Degas, Armstrong writes, “the female body—
the object— . . . is declared as unapprehensible; the viewer—the subject—remains separate, his
myth of sublimated union through aesthetic vision denied him. . . . How different [this view] is
from that of . . . Picasso (who admired Degas’s work and owned some of his images of prostitutes),
with his tremendous myth of virility and his myriad pictorial devices for formal apprehension and
erotic appropriation. The appropriate myth for Degas, whether biographically true or not, is that
of abstinence.” (Carol M. Armstrong, “Degas and the Female Body,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed.,
The Female Body in Western Culture [Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985], 241.) The point to be
made here, however, is that, with the Vollard Suite, it was Picasso’s turn to invoke the metaphors of
abstention and impotence, even if he seems to have done so with a touch of irony and disapproval.
50. In this instance, the “blind” eyes of the sculpted head do not seem to indicate the self-
sufficiency of classical art that Hegel so admired, since the rest of the face so clearly registers the
strain of looking. In this image the pupil-less eyes seem to function instead as a kind of commen-
tary on the impoverishment of vision unaccompanied by touch.
51. Picasso first etched the male head in profile, then reworked it in drypoint to a three-quarters
view that allows its features to more clearly register the figure’s frustration.
52. The significance of the partially covered window is raised by Wendy Steiner in her Pictures of
Romance, 134. The present chapter is indebted not only to specific observations of this sort, but
also to Steiner’s general discussion of the Suite in her chapter 5, “A Renaissance-Modernist Dal-
liance: Joyce and Picasso,” 121–143.
53. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “Huit entretiens avec Picasso,” Le Point 42 (October 1952), 24;
translated in Bolliger, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” xii.
54. Otto Benesch, “Rembrandts Bild bei Picasso,” in his Collected Writings, vol. 4 (London, 1973),
171.
55. Picasso could have seen The Artist and His Model (in its second state) either at the Bibliothèque
Nationale or in the Rothschild Collection at the Louvre. It is obviously also possible that he knew
the print only from reproductions. In any event, the Suite seems to mark the beginning of Picasso’s
dialogue with the art of Rembrandt—a colloquy that would continue sporadically for the rest of
Picasso’s life. See Janie L. Cohen, “Picasso’s Exploration of Rembrandt’s Art,” Arts Magazine 58
(October 1983), 119–125.
57. Fritz Saxl, “Zur Herleitung der Kunst Rembrandts,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für vervielfälti-
gende Kunst (1910), 42. Charles Blanc’s L’Oeuvre complète de Rembrandt (Paris, 1859) is typical of
many books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in that it introduces Rembrandt’s
Artist and His Model as “cette estampe, connue en Hollande sous le nom de Pygmalion” (vol. 2, 12,
cat. no. 157).
58. Ovid tells the story of Pygmalion in Book X, 243–297. For his changes to the myth, see
Solodow, The World of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” 215–216.
59. More might be said about the shape of this implement; although one can imagine a sculpting
tool of its approximate dimensions, we might be forgiven for thinking instead of an etching nee-
dle or burin. The confusion only reinforces the analogy between sculpture and the Vollard prints
themselves that runs throughout the “Studio” series.
60. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “Entretiens avec Picasso au sujet des Femmes d’Alger,” Aujourd’hui
(September 4, 1955), 12–13. Translated by Marilyn McCully in A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Crit-
icism, Reminiscences (Princeton, 1981), 251. Although the part of the comment that concerns Ca-
ravaggio is certainly not without interest, a discussion of its implications would plainly constitute
228
a digression from the subject at hand.
– 61. Many years later, in 1963, Picasso would execute a painting that was partially based on Rem-
229 brandt’s Dresden self-portrait with his wife Saskia, the two of them carousing in a tavern. Picasso’s
painting also includes references to Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina; but whereas the latter image is,
63. See Dore Ashton’s chapter on “Picasso and Frenhofer” in her A Fable of Modern Art (London,
1980), 75–95. Ashton makes no specific connection between Frenhofer and the “Rembrandt” fig-
ure of plate 36. She does, however, associate the two artists in reference to plate 34 (fig. 3.38), by
seeing in the “mesh of wild, gyrating lines” the expression of a “Frenhofer-like furor” (91). Ash-
ton also mentions that, in 1937 (just three years after the “Rembrandt” etchings were made), Pi-
casso moved into studios on the rue des Grands-Augustins, the same street that was the setting for
Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu. In fact Picasso’s building matched Balzac’s description extremely well, and,
according to Brassaï, the artist was delighted by the possibility that his might be the very studios
that were the setting for the story.
64. Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1956), vol. 14, 477. Pi-
casso seems to have assumed, as indeed the text encourages us to do, that the Rembrandt painting
Frenhofer most resembled is a self-portrait of the artist.
65. The frame might easily be overlooked—considered simply the embroidery on “Rembrandt’s”
hem—were it not for the lines that converge on the lower right corner of the print. They are al-
most certainly intended as sightlines, or perspective orthogonals, meant to affirm the figure’s (par-
tial) status as a painting.
66. That the similarity is no mere coincidence is evident from plate 35 of the Suite (not illustrated
here), in which “Rembrandt” again sports two sets of eyes, the second pair even more noticeable
than in plate 36.
67. This “centrifugal” process of improvisation could of course also be counted a “metamorphic”
one, as described in chapter 2. Like the series of Deucalion and Pyrrha images by Peruzzi, Rubens,
and Picasso, Rembrandt’s Artist and His Model and the plates of the Vollard Suite are related in unbro-
ken continuity but do not partake of any common essence.
69. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture
(New York, 1985), 118. On page 116, they describe the job of the secondary process as one of
creating stable representations within the mind:
Bound energy would be equivalent to a relational stability among mental representations, and relations are sta-
bilized by being limited. Bound energy is obviously a precondition both of logical, concentrated thought and of the
effective manipulation of objects in the external world. Knowledge depends on the ability to arrive at conclusions,
and conclusions can be reached only if the terms of our thoughts and the relations among them remain relatively
constant.
1. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: oeuvres, vol. 7 (Paris, 1957), nos. 135 and 423. In both of these
images, however, the Minotaur is comprised of only a (bull’s) head and (human) legs.
2. André Masson, “Re-‘Minotaure’,” View, 2d ser., nos. 1–4 (April 1942), 20.
3. On the brief but brilliant life of Documents, see Denis Hollier, “The Use-Value of the Impos-
sible,” October 60 (Spring 1992), 3–24.
4. Roger Caillois, who would become a regular contributor to Minotaure, included a lengthy dis-
cussion of the Palace at Knossos in his Le Mythe et l’homme (Paris, 1938), 137ff. The excavations
themselves were published in four volumes by Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (London,
1921–1936).
5. For a discussion of Bataille’s interest in the myth of the labyrinth, see Denis Hollier, Against Ar-
chitecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989),
61.
6. See Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” trans. Allan Stoekl, in Bataille, Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis, 1985), 45–52.
230
7. In 1937 Bataille would found his own journal, Acéphale, whose emblematic headless man (drawn
– for the cover, this time, by André Masson) might be considered a natural outgrowth—or, better,
231 ingrowth—of the bull-headed Minotaur.
8. On Picasso’s relationship to this group, see John Golding, “Picasso and Surrealism,” in John
9. We should also note that the right side of plate 84 is devoted to the gratification of the re-
maining senses: taste and smell by the still life with oysters, sound by the flute-playing figure above.
10. On the importance of the vision/touch polarity to Picasso’s work, and in particular to the be-
ginnings of cubism, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William Rubin and
Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York, 1992), 261ff.
11. Bataille, “Mouth,” Documents 2, no. 5 (1930), 299. Translated in Bataille, Visions of Excess,
58–59. Italics added.
12. Ibid. For a discussion of the “Mouth” entry, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cam-
bridge, Mass., and London, 1993), 156–157.
13. On the distinction between these two terms, see Michel Foucault’s homage to Bataille, “A Pref-
ace to Transgression,” in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and
Sherry Simon (Ithaca, 1977), 29–52.
16. For the structural relations between Bataille’s writings and Hegel’s, see Stephen W. Melville,
Philosophy beside Itself (Minneapolis, 1986), 74; and Rodolphe Gasché, “The Heterological Al-
manac,” in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, ed., On Bataille (New York, 1995), 157–208.
17. Documents 2, no. 3 (1930), 173–174; a translated version of Bataille’s essay appears in Visions
of Excess, 57–58, from which the following quotations are taken.
21. The present chapter, as is no doubt already apparent, is largely organized around a juxtaposi-
tion of Picasso’s Minotaur prints with writings by Bataille and the other contributors to Documents.
Recently Karen Kleinfelder, in an essay written for the occasion of the exhibition “Picasso and the
Mediterranean,” attempted much the same thing, again using Picasso’s Vollard Suite and Minotaur
etchings but now placing them alongside passages from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Arguing
that “the logic of the philosopher’s text parallels the logic of Picasso’s own complex body of works
inspired by the Mediterranean,” Kleinfelder sought to demonstrate Nietzsche’s pervasive influence
upon the artist. And indeed the juxtapositions proved illuminating. Comments such as the fol-
lowing, made as a prelude to discussion of Picasso’s Minotauromachy, seem particularly apt: “In a
truly transgressive turn that looks back to the pagan Dionysus and forward to the postmodern de-
construction to come, Picasso sets up the Apollonian-Dionysian duality as a dialectic designed to
undo the whole system of [Hegelian] dialectics” (28). Yet the discovered parallels never rise much
above that level of general similarity—principally a similarity of “tone.”
By contrast, in citing works by the contributors to Documents, the current chapter is citing
works that are in fact contemporaneous with the prints and are products of the same cultural mi-
lieu. It argues for similarities that are both rather more concrete than those revealed by the Nietz-
sche/Picasso comparison, and the result of something other than direct “influence.” (The
appropriate term would perhaps be “mutual overdetermination.”)
See Kleinfelder, “Monstrous Oppositions,” in Picasso and the Mediterranean (Humlebaek, Den-
mark, 1996), 22–33.
22. The resemblance to the figure of Tobit is strongest in the first of the “Blind Minotaur” plates
(fig. 4.3). Subsequently the Minotaur’s pose is altered slightly: the cane changes hands, for in-
stance, and the foremost leg drops back to take the rear. Yet, of all the characters in the “Blind
Minotaur” series, the figure of the Minotaur is transformed the least in the course of it, and this
stability seems designed specifically to preserve the reference to Rembrandt’s etching.
23. On Bataille’s interest in, and understanding of, sacrifice, see (among others) Hollier, Against
Architecture, esp. 47–49; Michèle Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore, 1982);
Rosalind Krauss, “No More Play,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cam-
bridge, Mass., and London, 1987), esp. 54–56; and Alfred Métraux, “Rencontre avec les ethno-
logues,” Critique, nos. 195–196 (1963), 677–684.
232
24. Péret’s De derrière les fagots was published with Picasso’s etching in a limited run by Editions Sur-
réalistes (Paris, 1934). A precursor to the Marat is the painting Woman with Stiletto, from 1931. For
– a discussion of that painting—one that places it in the context of Bataille and surrealism more
233 generally—see Neil Cox, “Marat/Sade/Picasso,” Art History (Winter 1994), 383–417.
25. See especially Benjamin Péret, Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là (Paris, 1936).
27. A number of these Massacre drawings were published, along with Picasso’s Minotaur collage, in
the first issue of Le Minotaure.
28. Though see also Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of Giacometti’s work and its relation to Batail-
lean notions of sacrifice in “No More Play,” 41–85.
29. The album was not actually published until 1936, but, according to Denis Hollier, an exhibi-
tion of the drawings was held at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher from June 13 to June 25, 1934. See
Hollier, Against Architecture, 133–134, as well as the note on the album’s publication in Georges
Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1970), 613–614. Bataille’s essay for the album is translated
in Visions of Excess, 130–136. Jean-Paul Clébert discusses the collaboration, and reproduces all of
Masson’s etchings, in his article “Georges Bataille und André Masson,” in André Masson. Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Axel Matthes and Helmut Klewan (Munich, 1990), 42–71.
30. Apparently Masson had wanted to name the album The Dying God, after one of the volumes of
Frazer’s Golden Bough. Bataille, however, prevailed upon him to adopt the more general title Sacrifices.
See Clébert, “Bataille und Masson,” 50.
31. Georges Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” Deucalion 5 (1955), 21–43; translated as
“Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” by Jonathan Strauss, and included in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Bot-
ting and Scott Wilson (Oxford, 1997), 279–295.
32. Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” 26–27; the English text comes from A. V. Miller’s
translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), 32.
33. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and Lon-
don, 1969), 7.
34. From Georges Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure (Paris, 1943), 140; quoted in Jacques Derrida,
“From Restricted to General Economy—A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Derrida, Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 252.
35. See Stephen Melville’s discussion of Hegel and Bataille, to which the present account is heav-
ily indebted, in Philosophy beside Itself, 71ff.
39. In “Rotten Sun,” Bataille himself comes close to saying the same thing:
If we describe the notion of the sun in the mind of one whose weak eyes compel him to emasculate it, the sun must
be said to have the poetical meaning of mathematical serenity and spiritual elevation. If on the other hand one ob-
stinately focuses on it, a certain madness is implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer pro-
duction that appears in light, but refuse or combustion, adequately expressed by the horror emanating from a
brilliant arc lamp.
40. Documents 2, no. 8 (1930), 10–20; translated in Visions of Excess, 61–72. See also Denis Hol-
lier’s analysis of the essay in Against Architecture, 79ff., to which the following discussion is indebted.
41. Bataille specifically cites the study by Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Essai sur la nature et la
fonction du sacrifice (Paris, 1898); translated as Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls
(Chicago, 1964).
42. Georges Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” Documents 2, no. 7 (1930), 389–397; reprinted in Bataille,
Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 247–254. Rosalind Krauss discusses both Luquet’s book and Bataille’s re-
view in her “Antivision,” October 36 (1986), 147–154; see esp. 149, on which the present summary
is based.
44. The interview, with Christian Zervos, was published in Cahiers d’art 10 (1935), 173. (The
translation is from Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views [New York, 1972], 38.)
234
45. A number of scholars have noted references to the myth of Oedipus in the prints of the blind
Minotaur. See, for example, Lydia Gasman, “Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso, 1925–1938”
– (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981), 1450–1451.
235
46. For an English translation of the essay, see “Sacrifices,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 130–136.
47. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. On agrarian sacrifices, see 66–76; for sacri-
fices involving birds, 54 and 57.
49. Note, too, that in these early prints the girl’s dress is explicitly patterned after the garb of the
ancient korai.
50. Interestingly enough, it has been suggested that the Minotauromachy’s doves derive from two
separate sources, both mosaics: one from the Capitoline Museum that is thought to reproduce a
Greek original of the fourth century B.C., and the other from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in
Ravenna. (See Sebastian Goeppert and Herma Goeppert-Frank, Die Minotauromachie von Pablo Picasso
[Geneva, 1987], 82.) The latter mosaic depicts two doves perched, as in the Minotauromachy, on ei-
ther side of a vessel of water. The former image contains four birds, yet the pose of the one on the
extreme left, and the dark coloration of the bird next to it, accord remarkably well with the con-
figuration in Picasso’s print. The Minotauromachy’s simultaneous evocation of these works, one clas-
sical, one Christian, thereby seems to parallel its dual evocation, through those same birds, of the
imagery of ancient pagan and Christian sacrifice.
51. Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 45–46; orig-
inally in Documents 2, no. 1 (1930).
52. Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,” trans. M. N. Seal, in Freud, Char-
acter and Culture (New York, 1963). Bataille’s reference to Freud’s work on the subject appears in a
note found among his papers (7 Aa fo 39); see Hollier, Against Architecture, 192, n. 121.
53. Although he kept his distance from the Collège de Sociologie, Mauss was nonetheless on fa-
miliar terms with its members. He had been an occasional contributor to Documents, and had even
written a brief essay for the journal’s special “Hommage à Picasso”; see Documents 2, no. 3 (1930),
177.
54. See especially Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (London, 1889).
59. If “large” is specified here, it is because size may indeed have been a factor in Picasso’s appre-
ciation of the print. Certainly the size of the Minotauromachy (approximately 50 × 70 cm) seems
designed to compete with such acknowledged masterpieces of printmaking as Rembrandt’s Descent
from the Cross, which itself had been made as a response to the challenge of Rubens’s Descent, or rather
to Lucas Vorsterman’s large-scale engraving after that work. For a discussion of Rembrandt’s etch-
ing and its relation to the Rubens engraving, see Christopher White, Rembrandt (London, 1984),
56–58.
60. Georges Bataille, “Le Sacré,” Cahiers d’art, fourteenth year, 1–4 (1939), 47–50. Translated and
reprinted in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 240–245. See, too, Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil, especially chap-
ter 10, which describes a bull’s goring of a matador through the matador’s right eye.
61. The original French edition (Paris, 1938) was accompanied by three André Masson etchings.
An English translation of the essay, by Ann Smock, was published (sans illustrations) as “The Bull-
fight as Mirror,” October 63 (Winter 1993), 21–40.
62. According to Françoise Gilot, Leiris frequently accompanied Picasso to the bullfights in Ar-
les; on at least one occasion (in 1949), Bataille was also a member of the party. See Gilot, Life with
Picasso (New York, 1964), 244.
66. See Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, esp. 318, where he says: “A dream is not constructed by
each individual dream-thought, or group of dream-thoughts, finding (in abbreviated form) sepa-
rate representation in the content of the dream—in the kind of way in which an electorate chooses
parliamentary representatives; a dream is constructed, rather, by the whole mass of dream-thoughts
236
being submitted to a sort of manipulative process in which those elements which have the most
numerous and strongest supports acquire the right of entry into the dream-content—in a manner
– analogous to election by scrutin de liste.”
237
67. Roger Caillois, La Nécessité d’esprit (Paris, 1981); translated as The Necessity of the Mind, trans.
69. It should be obvious enough—or should at least soon become obvious—that “automatic
thinking” as envisioned by Caillois has much in common with Freud’s primary process; both in-
volve the perpetual free association of ideas. (On the primary process, see chapter 3 above.) Both,
too, are subject to overdetermination—though in Freud’s scenario the latter is a mechanism ap-
parently acting upon the associations already produced by the unconscious, whereas for Caillois it
guides even the associations’ initial production.
70. Caillois, The Necessity of the Mind, 67. On the phenomenon of the ideogram, see Michael Sy-
rotinski, “Echec et nécessité dans La Nécessité d’esprit,” and Danielle Chaperon, “Sémantique de la
mante,” both of which appear in Laurent Jenny, ed., Roger Caillois, la pensée aventurée (Paris, 1992).
74. The results were published by the authors in Minotaure, nos. 3–4 (1933).
75. André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris, 1937); the quotation is from Mary Ann Caws’s English
translation, Mad Love (Lincoln, Nebr., 1987), 23. Breton also offers there an explanation of what
he hoped to accomplish through the circulation of the survey. He wanted, he said, “to emphasize
the interdependence of these two causal series (natural and human). . . . I think I have succeeded
in establishing that both kinds share a common denominator situated in the human mind, and
which is none other than desire. What I have wanted to do above all is to show the precautions
and the ruses which desire, in search of its objects, employs as it wavers in pre-conscious waters,
and, once this object is discovered, the means (so far stupefying) it uses to reveal it through con-
sciousness” (Mad Love, 24–25).
76. Thus, in Mad Love, Breton recounts his visit to a flea market with the sculptor Alberto Gia-
cometti, who discovered there a metal mask of unknown origin. Giacometti felt himself oddly, and
at the time inexplicably, attracted to the mask, which he bought and took home. Only later, in con-
versation with Breton, did he realize that the mask answered certain formal problems that he had
been having with his work, problems that had prevented him from completing the face of the fig-
ure in his sculpture Invisible Object. The intervention of the mask, Breton wrote, “seemed intended
to help Giacometti overcome his indecision on this subject. The finding of an object serves here exactly the
same purpose as the dream, in the sense that it . . . makes him understand that the obstacle he thought insurmountable
is cleared.” See Breton, Mad Love, 25–35. For an interpretation of Invisible Object that treats the metal
mask more as an objective ideogram (if without using that term) than as an example of objective
chance, see Krauss, “No More Play,” 43–85.
77. André Breton, Entretiens (Paris, 1952), 140–141. In his Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.,
and London, 1993), Hal Foster also quotes these remarks and proceeds to discuss objective chance
as a manifestation of the uncanny, an effect produced by the return of the repressed; see especially
29–42.
78. Quoted in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France,
1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago, 1990), 32.
79. Caillois and Breton, we should note, both attended Kojève’s lectures on Hegel—though, of
the two, Caillois was the much more regular participant.
80. The language of economies used here is borrowed from Derrida’s essay on Bataille and Hegel,
“From Restricted to General Economy—A Hegelianism without Reserve.”
81. In their 1987 book Die Minotauromachie von Pablo Picasso, Sebastian Goeppert and Herma Goep-
pert-Frank illustrate and discuss all three of these works—the Sleeping Ariadne, Goya’s Los proverbios
aquatint, and Titian’s Europa—in relation to the figure of the torera. The reader is simultaneously
referred, however, to works somewhat further afield—Ingres’s Vénus Anadyomène, one of the Dying
Niobids—and it soon becomes apparent that these earlier paintings and sculptures are evinced not
to demonstrate the overdeterminedness of Picasso’s torera, but simply to ascertain the significance
of her pose. (It is found to connote both “weakness” and “a sensual availability close to abandon.”)
Thus, despite the evident debt the present study owes to the work of Goeppert and Goeppert-
Frank, it departs from them substantially in its view of how these anterior images function within
the Minotauromachy. According to Goeppert and Goeppert-Frank, Picasso forged from these images
a totally personal vision: “Picasso . . . realized his works beginning with a repertoire of symbols de-
rived from preceding generations, epochs, and cultures, in order to integrate them, through para-
238
phrase, alteration, or perversion, into a pictorial rhetoric that would permit him to formulate a
totally subjective vision of reality” (5). The argument of the present study is, to the contrary, that
– even Picasso’s most ostensibly personal “visions” are thoroughly pervaded—which is to say,
239 overdetermined—by the images of others.
82. This might also be the place to mention that the Ariadne/torera, more than any other figure,
83. Caillois, Le Mythe et l’homme; see especially chapter 1, “Fonction du mythe,” 13–32.
84. There have, nonetheless, been scores of Jungian interpretations of the etching. See, among oth-
ers, Curt Seckel, “Picassos Wege zur Symbolik der Minotauromachie,” Der Kunst und das schöne Heim
85 (1973), 289–296; Wilhelm Boeck, Picasso (Stuttgart, 1955), 206ff.; and Herbert Read, The
Forms of Things Unknown (London, 1960), 64–75.
85. It is, of course, also likely that the figures carried personal associations for Picasso—to
friends, lovers, and family members. Certainly the literature on the Minotauromachy has been largely
devoted to uncovering such associations. If the same concerns have been omitted from the present
study, it is, at least in part, because that territory has already been so well covered. But it is also due
to the fact that autobiographical readings have tended to posit direct identifications (e.g., Picasso
= the Minotaur) that are completely at odds with the overdetermined nature of the imagery. We
have to take seriously Picasso’s statement to Dor de la Souchère: “If all the ways I have been along
were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.” (Quoted in Ash-
ton, ed., Picasso on Art, 159.) What is remarkable about the statement, however, is not so much Pi-
casso’s self-association with the Minotaur as the manner in which that association is made. It can
hardly be a case here of strict identification, since the Minotaur that Picasso describes is not a dis-
crete entity but rather a figure standing at the intersection of a vast number of quite different im-
ages and events—a figure that is, in a sense, overdetermined by those referents.
86. Along these lines, we might also consider the dark hatching that spreads across the entire sur-
face of the image. In this context, that hatching seems to gesture toward the kind of “cancellation”
that would in fact be the equivalent of Bataillean sacrifice—a cancellation whose product would
be a materialism so base that it would entirely (and impossibly) escape meaning.
87. When an earlier version of this chapter was presented at a symposium on Picasso and classi-
cism several years ago, it met resistance from a colleague clearly disturbed by what he perceived to
be its lack of objectivity. He insisted on the importance of intent and other criteria for firmly es-
tablishing what was actually a part of the print and what was merely the product of free associa-
tion. His response was one that Caillois would have dubbed repressive, bent on denying the multiple
overdeterminations of thought that it is precisely the ideogram’s function to bring to light.
88. Caillois, The Necessity of Mind, 104. This might be the appropriate place to recall Michel Leiris’s
entry in Documents’ “Critical Dictionary” for “Metamorphosis.” The definition begins: “Hors de soi.”
89. Caillois’s essay, entitled “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” has been excerpted and
translated into English by John Shepley as “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31
(Winter 1994), 16–33.
91. The specific language Caillois uses to describe and define mimicry (“the desire for reintegra-
tion with an original insensibility”) is strongly—and, we have to assume, purposefully—evoca-
tive of Freud’s description of the death drive. Compare, for example, the following sentences: “If
we assume that living things come later than inanimate ones and arose from them, then the death
instinct fits in with the formula [of the drives] . . . to the effect that instincts tend towards a re-
turn to an earlier state” (Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 5–6). “This assimilation to space is nec-
essarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life. It should be noted in any
case that in mimetic species the phenomenon is never carried out except in a single direction: the an-
imal mimics the plant, leaf, flower or thorn, and dissembles or ceases to perform its functions in
relation to others. Life takes a step backwards” (Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 30).
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which first introduced the notion of a death instinct, was published in
1920 and translated into French in 1927.
Significantly, Jacques Lacan—who also attended Kojève’s lectures on Hegel—very explic-
itly drew on both the Freudian death drive and Caillois’s discussion of mimicry in his theorization
of the Gaze. Equally significant in the present context is the fact that Lacan sought to present the
Gaze largely in relation to painting and the visual arts. See his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psy-
choanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), esp. 73 and 99–100.
93. The parallels here with our discussion in the previous chapter of the relationship between
Freud’s primary and secondary processes should be evident enough. Translating things into their
terms, we would have to say that the Hegelian dialectic is founded on a form of repression—at
least if we understand repression to be “a denial of entry into the conscious mind, not merely to
specific representations, but perhaps above all to the multiple relations among representations
which characterize the primary process.”
240
94. Caillois, Le Mythe et l’homme, 25.
– 95. Georges Bataille, “The Pineal Eye,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81. (Italics in the original.) For
241 more on Bataille’s use and understanding of myth, see also Rodolphe Gasché, System und Metaphorik
in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (Berne, 1978), esp. chapter 1, “Die mythologische Repräsenta-
A version of this chapter, with some important modifications, serves as the “Picasso” entry for The
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford, 1998).
1. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky,
eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York, 1992), esp. 262 and 283, n. 1.
2. Ibid., 271.
3. See Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966), esp. 120: “In
language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive
terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without pos-
itive terms.”
4. The most complete discussion of the relation between linguistic signs and the signs of Picasso’s
papiers collés and other cubist works is Yve-Alain Bois’s “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Rubin and
Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 169–208.
5. Her specific argument is that the left-hand piece is the one that denotes the surface of the vio-
lin; and that the lines of type on the rightmost fragment (which was clearly cut from the other and
turned back-to-front) are to be read as lines of hatching, more or less continuous with the char-
coal markings below, and so designating, like them, the shadowy space alongside the instrument.
See Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” 263ff.
6. The main exception, as Bois points out, was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who, in his preface to
Brassaï’s The Sculptures of Picasso, compares Picasso’s cubist works to “script” and refers to their ele-
ments as “signs.” See Brassaï, The Sculptures of Picasso, trans. A. D. B. Sylvester (London, 1949),
n.pag.; and Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” 173.
7. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977), 50.
8. For a similar notion of how the “classical” has, historically, been constructed, see Marshall
Brown’s essay “The Classic Is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History,” Critical In-
quiry, no. 9 (December 1982), 379–404.
9. Michel Leiris, “The Bullfight as Mirror,” trans. Ann Smock, October 63 (Winter 1993), 26.
10. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (London, 1980),
239–240.
11. In his “Semiology of Cubism,” 170, Yve-Alain Bois notes that “during the early and mid-
thirties one witnesses in Picasso’s art, among many, many other things, a certain return to his prob-
lematic of 1912–13. . . . One cannot but interpret the collage Picasso created in 1933 for the cover
of Minotaure as an homage to his earlier papiers collés, from which it directly borrows a few elements.”
The “mythological” logic that can be seen to govern both the papiers collés and the works of the thir-
ties should perhaps be considered another manifestation of this “problematic” return.
242
–
243
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index
i n dex
Bergson, Henri, 191, 210 (n. 17) Corot, Camille, 211 (n. 21)
Bersani, Leo, 230 (n. 69) Costello, Anita Coles, 226 (n. 46)
Bianchi Bandinelli, Ranuccio, 214 (n. 7) “Critical Dictionary.” See Documents
Bloch, Georges, 213 (n. 1) Crucifixion, as example of Bataillean
Bois, Yve-Alain, 226 (n. 42), 242 (n. 11) sacrifice, 166, 169, 172, 174
Bolliger, Hans, 71–72, 78–81, 90, 107, Cubism, 3, 6–7, 210 (nn. 16, 17). See
221 (n. 1) also Picasso: and cubism
Bourdelle, Emile Antoine, 99
Braque, Georges, 210 (n. 16) David, Jacques-Louis, 9, 153
Breton, André, 12, 94, 97, 184–185, 212 Death drive, 240 (n. 91)
(n. 30), 237 (n. 75), 237–238 Death’s-head moth, 183
(n. 76) De Chirico, Giorgio, 7, 12, 94, 212
Brilliant, Richard, 215 (n. 19) (n. 30)
Buchloh, Benjamin, 209 (n. 7) Degas, Edgar, 227 (n. 49)
Bulletin de l’effort moderne, 7 Delaunay, Robert, 68
Dermée, Paul, 6
Cahiers d’art, 18, 21, 167, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 160, 164, 192–193
Caillois, Roger, 173, 230 (n. 4), 237 Desire
(n. 69), 239 (n. 87) as driving unconscious thought, xvii,
Le Mythe et l’homme, 188–189, 191–193, 95–97
230 (n. 4) in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 157–158
La Nécessité d’esprit, 180–186, 191 and objective chance, 184, 237 (n. 75)
Callot, Jacques, 86–90, 222 (n. 10) repression of, in aesthetic contempla-
Capriccio, 85–91 tion, 111–112, 137–138
definition of, 86 Despiau, Charles, 99
as example of “psychic automatism,” 97 Dialectic, 158–160, 163–164, 172–173,
Castleman, Riva, 221 (n. 1) 176, 184–186, 192, 232 (n. 21),
Cézanne, Paul, 198 240 (n. 93). See also Hegel
Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Le. See Balzac Documents, 140–142, 150, 161, 166, 219
Classical art, 210 (n. 20), 215 (n. 19) (n. 47), 235 (n. 53)
Hegel on, 11, 111, 149, 190, 196 Doesburg, Theo van, 7–8, 49–52, 68
as model of ideal human subjectivity, Dreamwork, 95–96, 179–180, 188, 224
11–12, 42, 111, 138, 196, 219 (n. 27), 236 (n. 66)
(n. 47), 221–222 (n. 53) Dutoit, Ulysse, 230 (n. 69)
sculpture as epitome of, 99–104,
196–197, 225 (n. 35) Eluard, Paul, 184
Classicism (modern), 6–7, 10–12, 29, 33, Essentialism, 9–11, 61, 68, 211 (nn. 23,
69, 196–197 24), 219 (n. 47)
Etruscan art, 21, 111, 214 (n. 7) Griaule, Marcel, 219 (n. 47)
characterization of, 18–19, 214 (n. 6) Gris, Juan, 7, 210 (n. 16), 211 (n. 21)
compared with Picasso’s etchings, 52,
213 (n. 5), 215 (n. 19) Hegel, G. W. F., 145, 150, 160, 163,
Europa, 186–188 170–173, 184–186, 192–194, 196,
232 (n. 21), 240 (n. 93). See also
Family resemblances, 61–62, 84–85, 179 Dialectic
Feddes van Harlingen, Pieter, 128 on classical art, 11, 103, 111,
Flaxman, John, 34 148–149, 190, 219 (n. 47), 225
Foster, Hal, 238 (n. 77) (nn. 35, 37)
Foucault, Michel, 231 (n. 13) dialectic of master and slave, 158–159,
Fouquet, Jean, 9, 211 (n. 21) 192
Freedberg, S. J., 219 (n. 44) Phenomenology of Spirit, 157–159, 185,
Freud, Sigmund, 15, 172, 184–185, 240 192
(nn. 91, 93). See also Primary process Held, Julius, 59
on dreams, 95–96, 179–180, 188, 224 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 225 (n. 35)
(n. 27), 236 (n. 66) Hollier, Denis, 230 (nn. 3, 5), 233 (n. 29)
on overdetermination, 180, 237 (n. 69) Hubert, Henri, 166, 173–176, 193, 234
Fried, Michael, 107 (n. 41)
i n dex
(n. 5) as model of tradition, 61–62, 229
(n. 67)
and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 42–44, 91–92
Labyrinths, 142, 166, 193 and the Vollard Suite, 91
as structural model of thought, 151, Metzinger, Jean, 208 (n. 6), 210 (n. 16)
194 Mimicry, 191–192
Lacan, Jacques, 240 (n. 91) Minos, 142, 188
Lafaye, Georges, 44, 92 Minotaur. See also Picasso: Minotauromachy;
Léger, Fernand, 210 (n. 16) Picasso: Vollard Suite
Leighton, Patricia, 209 (n. 10) as figure for Picasso’s work, 194, 207
Leiris, Michel, 173, 176–178, 194, 205, Greek myth of, 142, 166, 188, 193
213 (n. 4), 219 (n. 47), 231 (n. 8), Minotaure, 140–142
236 (n. 62) Mithra, 150–155
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 10, 39–42, Morise, Max, 94–96
103, 196, 204, 211 (n. 26), 212 Mühlestein, Hans, 18, 213–214 (n. 6)
(n. 28), 215 (n. 17) Mussolini, Benito, 12
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 106 Myth
Lhote, André, 210 (n. 16) Bataille and, 160–161
Line, versus color, 33, 215 (n. 17) Caillois’s understanding of, 189–194
Lipchitz, Jacques, 210 (n. 16) (see also Caillois: Le Mythe et l’homme)
Luquet, G. H., 161–162 character of, 92–93, 206
Lyrical ideogram. See Ideogram “transformational” relationships in, 106
i n dex
(n. 39) . Death of Eurydice, 52, 219 (n. 42)
Praetorius, Michael, 86 . Deucalion and Pyrrha, 57–62
Praying mantis, 182–184 . The Fall of Phaethon, 49–52
Primary process, 95–98, 136–137, 240 . Procris and Cephalus, 45–49
(n. 93) . Vertumnus and Pomona, 62–64, 220 (n. 50)
Prometheus, 150, 161
Psychasthenia, 191–192, 240 (n. 91) Sacrifice, 153–178, 193–194, 239
Psychic automatism, 94–97, 191. See also (n. 86)
Ideogram of a god, 155, 161, 164, 166, 174,
“Pure painting,” 3, 6, 204 178, 193
Pygmalion, 128–132, 135 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 200, 202, 241
(n. 3)
Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), Saxl, Fritz, 128
92, 213 (n. 3) Sculpture, classical. See Classical art
Secondary processes, 137–138, 230
Raynal, Maurice, 6 (n. 69), 240 (n. 93)
Rembrandt van Rijn, 125–128, 228 Semiotics. See Saussure; Structural analysis
(n. 55), 229–230 (n. 61) Seurat, Georges, 211 (n. 21)
The Artist and His Model, 128–137 Severini, Gino, 7, 210 (n. 16)
The Blindness of Tobit, 151–152 Silver, Kenneth, 209 (n. 10), 210 (n. 17),
Descent from the Cross, 174–175, 236 212 (n. 28), 215 (n. 17), 218
(n. 59) (n. 39)
Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap, 125 Skira, Albert, 14–15, 21, 24, 140, 194,
Studies, 125 213 (n. 3), 214 (n. 11)
Révolution surréaliste, La, 12, 94–95, 209 Sleeping Ariadne, 188–190
(n. 15), 212 (nn. 30, 32) Steinberg, Leo, 34, 105–106, 112–113,
Robbins, Daniel, 221 (n. 2) 116–117, 197, 206, 215 (n. 18),
Robertson Smith, William, 173 227 (n. 47), 229 (n. 61)
Rodin, Auguste, 103–104 Steiner, Wendy, 106, 227 (n. 52)
Romains, Jules, 103–105, 225 (n. 35) Structural analysis, 98
Rosenberg, Léonce, 7, 210 (n. 18) and semiotics, 200–204, 241
Rubens, Peter Paul, 45–49, 136, 218 (n. 3)
(n. 39) of Vollard Suite images, 98–138
Descent from the Cross, 236 (n. 59) Summers, David, 211 (n. 24)
paintings for the Torre de la Parada, Surrealism, 12, 15, 94–97, 184, 212
45–65 (nn. 30, 32), 213 (n. 4). See
. Aurora, 218 (n. 36) also Automatic drawing; Psychic
. Bacchus and Ariadne, 62–65 automatism
. Cadmus and Minerva, 52–55 Symons, Peter, 45–46
Tankard, Alice Doumanian, 217 (n. 33)
Tériade (Efstratias Elestheriades), 6
Theseus, 81, 142, 193
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 186–188, 190
Torre de la Parada. See Rubens
Tradition, 52, 61–62, 68
“Transformational” relationships, 106
262
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263