Picasso and his Minotaur obsession

Gagosian, London W1 (020-7495 1500, www.gagosian.com). Until 25 August

Throughout his life, Pablo Picasso was obsessed with bulls, said Rachel CampbellJohnston in The Times. Over the course of his long career, he made innumerable depictions of them, frequently drawing on the bullfighting tradition of his native Spain, as well as the Minotaur of Greek mythology. He “seldom explained his imagery”, but it’s not hard to see that he viewed the animal as a kind of “alter ego”. Now, the artist’s friend and biographer Sir John Richardson has made Picasso’s fixation with the bull the subject of a “viscerally stirring” new exhibition at London’s Gagosian gallery. The show brings together more than 200 works reflecting Picasso’s interest in bulls – drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture created at every stage of his career – as well as family photographs and documentary films. Sometimes he presents the bull as a “hirsute”, “hulking” creature, at others as “sensually erotic” and “surprisingly gentle”. This is a show “to get lost in for hours”.

Picasso’s fascination with bulls goes back to his youth, said Alastair Smart in the Daily Mail. As a boy, he attended bullfights; the earliest work here – Le Petit Picador (1889) – was painted when he was just eight. And after leaving Spain for Paris, he took the “memories of – and nostalgia for – the corrida with him”. His imagination was also “fired” by archaeological discoveries at the ancient palace of Knossos on Crete, where King Minos was supposed to have built a labyrinth to house the “halfhuman, half-bull” Minotaur. The monster’s “unchecked appetites” clearly chimed with Picasso’s “sexual voracity”; yet he was just as ready to depict the bull as a “fragile”, almost touching, creature. Some of the more “engaging” works here are prints created in the 1930s, when Picasso’s marriage was falling apart: 1934’s Minotaure Aveugle Guidé par une Fillette, for example, shows the beast blinded, guided by a girl resembling the artist’s young mistress. Picasso could be “wildly inconsistent”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Alongside the highlights here, we see more than a few exhibits that are self-indulgent, if not “downright bad”. Well, if so, they escaped my notice, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. This is a show packed with masterpieces: “tumbling, frame-filling compositions drawn in Picasso’s miraculous, unwavering line”. Best of all are drawings and prints such as La Minotauromachie, a “transcendent” set of etchings from 1935 that depict the Minotaur towering over a figure resembling the artist’s deceased sister. This tremendous exhibition only underlines Picasso’s “irrepressible, inventive genius”.