‘Minotauromachie’ (or ‘Minotauromachy’ in the English translation), Picasso’s seminal print from 1935, is an object of perennial derision and confusion. Variously regarded as an emblem of Picasso’s reactionary turn to classicism, or as a veiled confession of his sexual misconduct, the print has suffered from inadequate critical attention. Previous critics tend to read the artwork as an indication of Picasso’s stylistic degeneration in the ‘20s, concomitant with his abandonment of cubism. Others have strained to ascribe biographical meaning to an otherwise intractable work. Biographical and psychoanalytic readings alternately cast its central figures as Picasso’s ex-wife Olga, his mistress Marie-Thérèse, and even his deceased younger sister. While Picasso’s personal life often provides insight into his compositions, such explanations do not suffice.

To unlock the integral meaning of ‘Minotauromachy’ within Picasso’s body of work, a new methodology is necessary. I approach the artwork with an ethnographic view of the bullfight as a living practice. Drawing on firsthand testimony from the sport’s spectators and practitioners, I situate Picasso’s work within a more expansive modernist interest in the bullfighting motif. As concerns my reading of the work itself, I draw equally on the psychoanalytic approach promulgated by Rosalind Krauss, and the semiotic approaches of commentators like Barthes and Louis Marin to unlock the print’s integral meaning. I read Picasso’s work as a gesture of infinite regress; the composition blocks the beholder’s identification at the same time as it invites it. As concerns this dual approach, it is only by reading the bullfight as a closed-loop system of signifiers that one does full justice to its complexity and systematic rigor as a codified sport; and it is only by using this approach in concert with psychoanalysis that one captures the interpretive demands Picasso’s etching places on the beholder. In sum, this approach allows us to demonstrate ‘Minotauromachy’s’ filiation with cubism, and thus to reinvest the artwork with its full radical potency. ‘Minotauromachy’ is not just a piece of chauvinist dross from the Master’s regrettable foray into the Mediterranean antique—but a radically significant work, born from the internal logic of Picasso’s pathbreaking innovations in Cubism.

This project was supported by the Pincus-Magaziner Family Undergraduate Research and Travel Fund grant.