The Minotaur and the Muse: Picasso’s Carmen Fixation

Written by Fernando Larousse Thursday, 02 February 2012 20:25

PARIS - Mistresses and wives successively served as Pablo Picasso’s muses, but they were not enough.  He also sought inspiration from fictional women.  And who better than Carmen to personify the themes of sex, love, violence, tragedy and death that run through so much of his work?  That Carmen was born in a novella by a Frenchman, Prosper Mérimée, and made famous in an opera by another, Georges Bizet, mattered little to him.  For Picasso, the Spanish-born maestro who spent most of his life in France, the Gypsy temptress from Seville was also deeply Spanish: proud, provocative, passionate and doomed.

The exotic and erotic aspects of his Carmen are explored in “Picasso-Carmen: Sol y Sombra,” a show of some 220 works at the Musée Picasso here through June 24.  Its subtitle, “Sol y Sombra,” refers to the sun and shade sides of bullrings, but in this context it also underlines the extremes of life represented by Carmen.

On two occasions late in life when illustrating editions of Mérimée’s story, he acknowledged that she was fictional. But more often he seemed to evoke a memory of Carmen, in spirit and appearance, when he portrayed the women he loved and the women he imagined.

Bullfighting is of course ever present in Picasso’s work, not only because he was a fervent aficionado (he frequently attended corridas in Arles in southern France), but also because he used it as a metaphor for the animal passions driving human behavior, including his own.

In Mérimée and Bizet too these parallels are self-evident: Carmen is killed outside Seville’s bullring by her jilted lover, Don José, just as her new lover, the matador Escamillo, is slaying a bull inside the arena.

For Picasso, who often portrayed himself as a bull or minotaur, bullfighting was very much a sexual ritual.  This exhibition even displays a dozen anonymous postcards from Picasso’s private collection, which show a bare-breasted female matador confronting a bull in the form of a phallus.

Early in his career, in a 1898 drawing of a hooded woman titled “Carmen,” he imagined a more typical Sevillana, her dark hair covered by a lace scarf, or mantilla.  This is also how he portrayed his mistress, Fernande Olivier, and a friend, Benedetta Canals, in Paris in 1905.  And in 1917 Olga Khokhlova, soon to become his first wife, is also shown wearing a mantilla.

Was he thinking of Carmen?  The reality is that beyond his contributions to new editions of “Carmen” in 1948-49 and 1964, he showed little interest in illustrating Carmen’s story.  Rather the premise of this exhibition, which has been organized by Anne Baldassari, the director of the Musée Picasso, is that Carmen influenced the way he saw all women. 

As a result “Picasso-Carmen” includes numerous drawings and paintings of nude women and couples making love and, more disturbingly, a sketch of a man hitting a woman and another of a man strangling a woman.  The seedier side of love is reinforced by his Blue Period painting “La Celestina,” in which a contemporary Barcelona brothel keeper is portrayed as the infamous procuress of a 15th-century Spanish story.

In the absence of a defining image of Carmen by Picasso, Ms. Baldassari has chosen to use an embroidered postcard of a beautiful brunette in Sevillana attire for the show’s poster and the cover of its catalog.  Other, no less delightfully kitsch, embroidered postcards from Picasso’s collection show popular matadors and Spanish women in folk costumes.  The spirit of Carmen becomes more apparent in his bullfighting series, many of which show women as bullfighters, including one of his long-time mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, being tossed by a bull and another of a female matador killed by a bull.  In some the woman is represented by a horse being gored by a bull.

Still, since Picasso portrays himself as a minotaur, he also appears caressing, kissing and seducing women.  Then there are engravings in which the minotaur is slain.  And if any doubt remains that love and bullfighting are violent affairs, a series of photographs capture moments when matadors are gored and carried out of the ring near death.

So does this show shed fresh light on Picasso’s famously tumultuous relationship with women?  Only perhaps to suggest there were as many Carmens as there were women in his life, and with the possible exception of his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, who outlived him, he cast each woman as the Carmen he needed at the time. 

A more organic conclusion is offered by the way “Picasso-Carmen” has been organized.  Because the Musée Picasso has no large temporary display space, the exhibition is presented in its ordinary galleries.  It is therefore easy for visitors accidentally to veer off the official route.  And in doing so, they may discover that Carmen is also present elsewhere in his art, not by name, but as an expression of Picasso’s obsession with rebellion and freedom.

“Picasso-Carmen: Sol y Sombra” continues at the Musée Picasso in Paris through June 24 ; www.musee-picasso.fr

By ... Alan Riding