Lisa Florman-Myth and Metamorphosis - Picasso's Classical Prints of The 1930s-The MIT Press (2001)

myth and metamorphosis
Lisa Florman
t h e m i t p r e ss • c ambridge, massachusetts • london, england

Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s
© 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
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.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Florman, Lisa Carol.

Myth and metamorphosis : Picasso’s classical prints of the 1930s / Lisa Florman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-06213-5 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Picasso, Pablo, 1881–1973—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Classicism in art. I. Title.
NE2049.5.P5 F56 2000
769.92—dc21 00-56220
For David
contents
List of Illustrations viii
Preface xvi
1 In the Background of Picasso’s Classical Prints 2
2 Metamorphic Images: Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid 14
3 The Structure of the Vollard Suite 70
4 Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs 140
5 The Classical Prints in the Context of Picasso’s Oeuvre 196
Notes 208
Bibliography 244
Index 256
i l l u s t rat i o n s
All works by Pablo Picasso © 2000 Estate 2.1

of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society Picasso, unpublished version of The Death of
(ARS), New York. All works by André Orpheus, 1930. Etching, 22.5 × 17.1 cm.
Masson © 2000 Artists Rights Society Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. 16
(ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
2.2
FRONTISPIECE Masson, Furious Suns, 1925. Automatic
Picasso, The Minotauromachy (colored proof ), drawing, ink, 32 × 24 cm. Galerie Louise
1935. Etching, 49.8 × 69.3 cm. Musée Leiris. 17
Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Blot.
2.3
1.1 Engraving of an Etruscan mirror, from
Picasso, Three Women at the Fountain, 1921. Oil Eduard Gerhard et al., Etruskische Spiegel, vol. 2
on canvas, 203.9 × 174 cm. The Museum of (Berlin, 1845), pl. CXXVI. 19
Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Allan D. Emil. Photo © 2000 The Museum 2.4
of Modern Art. 5 Picasso, The Death of Orpheus, 1930
(September 18). Etching, 22.3 × 17.1 cm.
1.2 Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
Picasso, Studies, 1920. Oil on canvas, 100.5 × RMN–Franck Raux. 20
81 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo
RMN–R. G. Ojeda. 8
2.5 2.12
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
in the background of picasso’s classical prints

reengage—indeed, to completely rethink—the issue of “classical” art. The Vol-
lard Suite, far from being a casual throwback to the earlier “classical period” of the
1920s, likewise asserts a significantly different view of classicism. This is not to
say that Picasso’s early classicizing works are irrelevant to an understanding of
the later prints. Quite the contrary, if we want to come to terms with the Meta-
morphoses illustrations, for example, or the plates of the Vollard Suite, it is essential
that we at least briefly review Picasso’s “classical period” of the teens and twen-
ties. The works of that era—and, even more, the art criticism that grew up
around them—greatly shaped the background of expectations against which the
prints of the thirties were made and first seen. The present chapter sketches in
that background of expectations, so that the prints’ distinctive features will
eventually stand out more sharply in relief.
To understand Picasso’s classicizing paintings of the teens and twenties, it
is in turn necessary to view them against the separate critical horizon out of
which they emerged. Primarily we need to remember that, in the years immediately
preceding Picasso’s so-called classical period, his name had been closely associ-
ated with modernist notions of artistic progress. Those associations can be traced
to at least 1913, when Guillaume Apollinaire first discerned in cubism a form of
“pure painting” that was, however, “not yet as abstract as it would like to be.”3
From such claims the conclusion could easily be drawn—and was, repeatedly—
that the future history of art would tell of a progressive divestment of represen-
tation and all other “extraneous” pictorial conventions, until at last painting
arrived at a state of absolute, abstract purity. And yet Picasso, whose first great
nod in the direction of abstract formalism had launched the avant-garde on its
modernist course, proved to be a singularly unreliable guide. In fact he used the
occasion of his first public statement on painting, in 1923, to denounce the
whole notion of stylistic progress. “Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my
painting evolved,” he complained. “To me there is no past or future in art. If a
work cannot live always in the present it must not be considered.”4
Picasso’s paintings of the period made the same statement even more
forcefully (fig. 1.1). With their references to ancient sculpture and their empha-
sis on figuration and volumetric modeling, Picasso’s “classical” works posed a de-
liberate challenge to modernist paradigms of artistic evolution. As early as 1914,
Picasso had begun experimenting with various overtly traditional modes.5 Ini-
tially these projects occupied only a small fraction of his time and involved the
art of chronologically disparate periods. But increasingly they took on a specifi-
cally antique cast. As teleological accounts of painting were becoming ever more
frequent—principally among artists who traced its development through cu-
bism to their own most recent, abstract compositions—Picasso ever more fully
engaged a style at the furthest remove from modernism, at the distant end, so to
speak, of the historicist arrow.6 He thus positioned his art in direct opposition
to the paradigms of stylistic progress.7 Judging from his 1923 statement, what
Picasso most strongly objected to in these teleological models of art was their
implication of a preordained goal toward which all works were (or should be) di-
rected. In fact Picasso went to some length to discourage any critical approach
that would reduce the great diversity of art by subjecting it all to the same crite-
ria of value:
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
Picasso, Three Women at the Fountain, 1921.

1.1
equated cubism’s artistic radicalism with comparably radical political beliefs,
were just as quick to proclaim this recent stylistic shift as evidence of a return to
traditional values in all areas of society.10 As they saw it, the period of reckless
abandon that had given rise to modern art was finally at a close.
In fact this account gained such widespread acceptance that even suppos-
edly avant-garde critics adopted its fundamental premise. Many at least hoped to
salvage cubism for the newly declared Classic Age by denying that cubism repre-
sented any fundamental rupture. Differences, they claimed, were evident at only
the most superficial level of style; on a deeper plane cubist and classicizing works
were united by certain fundamental characteristics. Thus, for example, Maurice
Raynal emphasized that Picasso’s “classical” and cubist works were equivalent in
terms of their “plastic purity.”11 Likewise Paul Dermée, forecasting “an impend-
ing Classic Age” in 1918, claimed that the hallmark of classical art was purity—
its rejection of all extra-painterly concerns, by which he meant specifically
anecdote or narrative: “Literary painting or picturesque literature are symptoms
of decadence. . . . In the great classical epochs, the independence and autonomy
of each art was carefully safeguarded. Neither overlapping nor penetration: pu-
rity!”12 Dermée’s language, although more strident, clearly recalls that of earlier
cubist criticism, in which supporters and detractors alike had pointed to Pi-
casso’s “rejection of literary content” as fundamental to the new art.13 Similarly,
it was via this shared critical vocabulary of pictorial autonomy and “purity”
through the avoidance of anecdote that Tériade could later claim cubism had ac-
tually initiated the classical revival.14
Art criticism in France has never been univocal, and even during the early
1920s there was a good deal of disagreement, much of it still centered on the rel-
ative merits of figuration and abstraction. Yet a surprisingly broad consensus did
exist among writers across the artistic and political spectra as to which quali-
ties, in general, were the most desirable.15 “Pure,” “structured,” “harmonious,”
6 “ordered,” “constant,” “ideal,” “invariable,” “serene”—all these were epithets of
– approval that could be applied to classical and cubist paintings interchange-
7 ably.16 Needless to say, use of this common terminology required a selective read-
ing of cubism in particular and, in some cases, revisions of its earlier appraisals. Not

only did the rhetoric of revolution all but disappear, so too did any type of anal-
ysis that threatened to compromise the “constant,” “ideal” and “invariable” char-
acter of the works under discussion. Thus, although earlier criticism had dwelled
on an assumed temporal dimension in cubist paintings, that tack itself proved to
be of relatively brief duration.17
That Picasso was on occasion also thinking explicitly about the relationship
between the two styles is evident from the curious painting of 1920, now in the
Musée Picasso, in which four small classicizing figure studies intermingle with six
miniature cubist still lifes (fig. 1.2). The painting clearly sanctions a comparison
of the styles, for their cohabitation of the canvas is its very raison d’être. Yet the ex-
act nature of that comparison is difficult to determine. If seen in light of Picasso’s
antihistoricist remarks of 1923, the painting appears to insist that we regard
cubism and classicism as simultaneously available alternatives—distinct pictor-
ial modes each with a continuing validity. In the absence of those remarks, how-
ever, it would be possible to construe things otherwise. Then the painting, instead
of seeming to present cubism and classicism as alternatives whose differences are
thereby emphasized, might easily appear to assert their commonalities. Such indeed
was the point of most classical/cubist comparisons drawn during the 1920s.
Throughout that period, discussion of the styles’ similarities centered around
Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne and its Bulletin, which together
served as one of the most important showcases for late cubism and other “classi-
cizing” trends. Even Picasso, who had at one time exhibited his work through
Rosenberg,18 allowed his paintings to be reproduced in the Bulletin, alongside still
lifes by Ozenfant and Severini, de Chirico’s recent figure paintings, and cubist
compositions by Juan Gris, among others. Typical of many of the essays Rosen-
berg published was Theo van Doesburg’s “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” serial-
ized in four issues of the journal from December 1925 through March of the
following year. Stated crudely, van Doesburg’s aim was to show that modern ab-
straction was really the equivalent of classical art, with all the “nature” factored
out. “If harmony, the essence of beauty,” van Doesburg wrote,
8
– 1.2
9 Picasso, Studies, 1920.
is realized in the fashion of nature—that is, through the grouping, arrangement, and ordered

measure of forms borrowed from nature (men, animals, plants, etc.)—there may yet be art
in the work, but that art is not the result of the artistic idea, because beauty did not appear in
a form that was direct, independent, and disinterested, but in an indirect form, borrowed from
nature. . . . Such was classical art.
You must now ask yourself: “Can there exist an art more perfect than that, where the
essence of beauty would appear completely in the fashion of art?” That is precisely the logi-
cal deduction of modern art.19
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,

would be perforce a better work of art. Extrapolating from these ideas, some crit-
ics in the 1910s and 1920s directly equated painting with its material proper-
ties and called for an increasingly nonrepresentational art. But whether they
preferred figuration or abstraction, the vast majority of critics singled out for
praise those formal traits—balance, harmony, wholeness, and unity—that, in
themselves, seemed to express the atemporality that was considered to be paint-
ing’s indivisible essence.27
It is hardly necessary to point out the tremendous gulf between this highly
prescribed view of art and Picasso’s stated belief that “different motives in-
evitably require different methods of expression.” Nor is it very difficult to see
how a deeply ingrained essentializing attitude toward painting might be ex-
ploited by conservative or reactionary ideologues seeking to deny diversity and
historical change; to many, the medium itself had come to epitomize timeless-
ness and, by extension, eternal values.28 But “classical” works in particular were
subject to ideological interpretation, a fact that again owed much to Winckel-
mann’s precedent. Winckelmann’s admiration of Greek sculpture was strongly
bound up with his admiration of ancient Greece. His written descriptions of the
freestanding male nudes, especially, repeatedly emphasized the work’s self-
containment, unity, and wholeness, as well as its “universality,” its lack of par-
ticularizing detail. Together these features were seen to provide a model of a
similarly constituted ideal subjectivity: of an autonomous individual whose
singularity was in perfect harmony with, and therefore representative of, society
at large. Half a century after Winckelmann, Hegel would base his own claims
for the formal perfection of classical sculpture on the same ideological ground:
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

newly intensified pluralism was perhaps one of the few remaining strategies
whereby he could check an increasingly prevalent and constraining essentialist
view of art.
Even so, artistically and politically conservative critics continued to single
out the artist’s “classical” work for praise, and to interpret its style and imagery
along narrow, essentialist lines. In 1929, for example, Waldemar George, who
had recently written a monograph on Picasso, declared that “the poetic and ideo-
logical significance” of the artist’s classicizing figures resided “in their fixed and
immobile features.”34 However contrary such claims may have been to Picasso’s
intent, they undeniably shaped expectations of classicizing works well into the
next decade. Their underlying assumptions concerning the necessary unity and
timelessness of “classical” art were thus an important component of the back-
ground of understanding against which Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations and
other prints of the early thirties took shape. Indeed, as we begin to look at the
prints in detail, we may suspect that it was the prevalence of such comments, and
their potential insidiousness, that actually provided the impetus for Picasso’s
return to classicism in those years.
2
Metamorphic Images:
Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid
On the surface at least, Picasso’s return to a classicizing mode in his prints of

the 1930s seems a surprising development. Not only was much of his other work
from that period in a decidedly surrealist vein, but the artistic and political cli-
mate guaranteed that the move would be fraught with ideological implications.
Moreover, the specific circumstances of his return—a collaboration with Albert
Skira on the young man’s very first publishing venture—were hardly more aus-
picious. Even if the stories are true that Madame Skira confronted the artist on
the beach at Juan-les-Pins to plead her son’s cause, they do not explain Picasso’s
willingness to take part in the project. Ultimately his decision seems to have
turned on the choice of text. Under no circumstances, Picasso reportedly told
14 Madame Skira, would he illustrate a book on Napoleon, as her son had initially
– requested. He might, however, be willing to consider “a classical author—per-
15 haps something mythological.”1
The text that Picasso and Skira finally settled upon was the Metamorphoses
metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

of Ovid, a work that apparently satisfied both of Picasso’s criteria. Certainly the
poem was “something mythological,” its narrative comprising nearly 250 sepa-
rate myths drawn from the ancient repertoire. Similarly, Ovid—by virtue of the
fact that he wrote in Latin and lived during the reign of Augustus—generally
qualified as a “classical author.” Yet there was also a sense in which the Metamor-
phoses could be considered profoundly unclassical, particularly as the term was un-
derstood in 1930, when Picasso approved the text. “Noble simplicity and quiet
grandeur” are conspicuously absent from the poem. And although Ovid wrote in
the dactylic hexameter of heroic epic, his work confounds all expectations of the
kind of unified and rationally unfolding plot associated with the genre and per-
haps best exemplified by Virgil’s Aeneid.2 In contrast to the rigorously teleologi-
cal advance of Virgil’s narrative, the Metamorphoses’ aggregative structure and lack
of plot line seem particularly blatant; its 250 separate myths are held together
only by Ovid’s ingenuity and the recurring theme of unanticipated change.3
Moreover, in place of the pietas of Virgilian epic, many of Ovid’s stories re-
volve around the very “unclassical” sentiments of unredeemed violence, failure,
and lust. These were precisely the characteristics that, in 1930, had begun to at-
tract the surrealists’ interest in myth.4 Like Freud before them, the surrealists felt
that ancient mythology provided a means of access to the darker reaches of the
unconscious. And although this was not especially what drove Picasso’s fascina-
tion with the material (not, at least, where this particular project was concerned),
his first etchings for the Metamorphoses—illustrations of the Death of Orpheus—are
strikingly similar to André Masson’s emotionally charged “automatic drawings,”
as well as to that artist’s later, mythological works (figs. 2.1 and 2.2). Picasso uti-
lized the same harsh angularity and rapid strokes, along with irrational juxtapo-
sitions of scale, to create a visually expressive equivalent to the furious violence
of Orpheus’s attackers.
Despite what may seem the fitting correlation between the “unclassical”
nature of the Orpheus myth and the overt anticlassicism of Picasso’s illustration,
the artist apparently soon became dissatisfied with the etching. Returning to the
16
– 2.1
17 Picasso, unpublished version of The Death of Orpheus, 1930.
Masson, Furious Suns, 1925.

2.2
drawing board, he reversed course, eventually settling on a remarkably classiciz-
ing mode. The style of the new illustrations recalls that of Greek red-figure vases
or, closer still, Etruscan mirror engravings, whose disproportionate figures are
rendered exclusively in line, without aid of either modeling or color, and, like Pi-
casso’s, tend to fill the space of the composition (figs. 2.3 and 2.4).5 Of course,
the “classical” status of Etruscan art might itself be considered somewhat dubi-
ous, its Hellenic features having been grafted onto a very different aesthetic. This
in fact was the emphasis of a 1929 article published in the Cahiers d’art, whose ed-
itor, Christian Zervos, was then at work on the first volume of Picasso’s oeuvre
catalogue. Zervos had asked the archaeologist Hans Mühlestein to characterize
Etruscan art and to explain his interest in it, which the scholar did in an essay en-
titled “Histoire et esprit contemporain.” Implicitly echoing Nietzsche’s asser-
tion that the great art of antiquity was motivated by two opposed aesthetic
impulses—in Nietzsche’s writings they were termed the Dionysian and the Apol-
lonian—Mühlestein identified Etruscan art’s indigenous element with an un-
controlled, “expansive energy,” its Hellenic borrowings with a more ordered,
“classical” strain. Mühlestein’s studies had convinced him that, in general, the
classical aesthetic, with its “canons and systems, leads straight to academicism,
whereas the other, because of its hybridism, ends in fruitless anarchy.”6 The finest
Etruscan works, he argued, were those in which the two tendencies were held in
perfect balance, each fully implicated in the other. The compound nature of these
works Mühlestein contrasted—in terms that held a certain contemporary rele-
vance—to a purer but oppressive classicism that sacrificed invention to the or-
ganic unity and technical perfection of each work. His article in fact specifically
recommended the Etruscan example to modern artists as an antidote to the
prevalent “idea of a world governed by purely mechanical evolution.”7 Indeed,
as we will see, the Etruscan art described by Mühlestein (its classical facade un-
dergirt by an anarchic hybridism) did find a remarkable correlate in Picasso’s
18 “Etruscan” illustrations. Their “superficial” Hellenism offered a more subtle
– yet ultimately more powerful means of subverting essentialist doctrine than had
19 his earlier, openly unclassical mode.
Engraving of an Etruscan mirror.

2.3
20
– 2.4
21 Picasso, The Death of Orpheus, 1930 (September 18).
Moreover, for anyone who was the least bit familiar with Etruscan art and

who recognized its forms in Picasso’s illustrations, the style of those illustra-
tions would have called attention to the absurdity of popular conceptions of clas-
sicism as devoid of “literary content.” Current dogma may have held to the
“classical” as a category of pure form, but the Etruscan mirror engravings whose
style the illustrations mimicked clearly revealed that those forms had often been
the vehicle of complex narratives. Not only had the Etruscans appropriated sty-
listic elements from Greek art, but they had also adapted much of its mytholog-
ical content to their own purposes and needs. The engraved Etruscan mirrors in
particular were replete with the stories of Greek myth.8 In a sense, their narra-
tivity was one of their most classical features, their most conspicuous link to the
Hellenic world. In this sense, too, the “Etruscan” style of Picasso’s Metamorphoses
etchings is entirely appropriate to their context and illustrative function.
Certainly when they are encountered within the book, the etchings’ narra-
tive underpinnings are immediately apparent. Zervos, in a review for the Cahiers
d’art written shortly after publication of Skira’s edition, praised both editor and
artist on these grounds. “We have frequently seen illustrated books,” he observed,
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
2.6
Picasso, Two Heads (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XV), 1931.
sufficiently similar to a number of Picasso’s other works of the period that we

might be tempted to attribute it to his own invention, in fact remains close to
Ovid’s narrative. Undoubtedly its vengeful women, martyred artist, and espe-
cially its other victim of violence, the bull,12 all carried special significance for Pi-
casso. Yet they all can be traced to Ovid’s account of the onslaught:
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.
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).
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-
2.10
Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (September 18).
scopic image of motion. Unable to grasp both views simultaneously, we run

through them in succession, each cycle causing Philomela, in effect, to kick out
at her assailant.
It is tempting to see the print’s action as a counterattack, too, on certain
tenets of idealist aesthetics, newly resurrected in much of the art-theoretical
writing of the period. Specifically, the illustration challenges the then-prevalent
association of a simple linear style of drawing with the ideal of “classical purity.”
30
– 2.11
31 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).
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

color precisely because color was thought prey to the vagaries of subjective re-
sponse,17 Picasso’s images demonstrate the extent to which even “chaste con-
tours” might be full of ambiguity, and fully dependent on the viewer to puzzle
out their forms.
Again and again in the Metamorphoses illustrations, Picasso exploited the am-
biguity inherent in line drawing to animate his figures with the radical illusion of
movement. He developed a surprisingly broad array of techniques, each of them
conjuring a different motion, each simultaneously undermining the dominant
belief in a classicism of clarity and stasis. For the Death of Orpheus (fig. 2.4), to re-
turn to that example, Picasso produced a nearly cinematic sense of motion by
confusing the contours that separate Orpheus’s attackers. As before, the device
hinges on a shared outline: in this case, the narrow, elongated S-curve that links
the torsos of the two Thracian women on the left. The line serves as a kind of ar-
ris, not so much distinguishing the figures as suggesting a pivot between them.
Elsewhere in the group whole contours are left undrawn, so that, in passing from
the bacchante at left to her sisters alongside, we have trouble finally determining
their external limits, or even which head belongs to which body. The figures seem
to flow one into another, as they swivel and bend and move ever closer to Or-
pheus: three women acting out a single, concerted lunge.
Orpheus’s own contortions also turn on ambiguity, despite the fact that his
contours are complete, his silhouette relatively simple. In this instance, the un-
certainty arises within the bounded expanses of the figure, in the unmarked areas
between outlines. Picasso omitted all internal signposts from Orpheus’s torso,
all indications of either backbone or chest that would normally have provided us
with a means of orienting the body in three dimensions. Nor do we get much
help from below, for although Orpheus’s knees seem to point in our direction,
so too do both his buttocks and his groin. The hands only add to the uncertainty;
with but a slight mental effort on our part, each can be made into either left or
right, truly ambidextrous. The figure of Orpheus is a spatial amphiboly:18 inter-
preted one way, he appears to fall over backward, while another view has him
twisted, chest to the ground. Alternating between frontal and dorsal readings, we
seem to be in collusion with Orpheus’s attackers, effectively wringing him out
like a rag with each visual reorientation.
To some extent, all of the figures in the Metamorphoses illustrations demand
our complicity. They all require us to flesh out the gaps between outlines, to use
our imagination to transform their flat, blank passages into corpulent, three-
dimensional form. The same might be said of any contour drawing, of course;
but if we compare Picasso’s illustrations with, say, the line drawings of John Flax-
man (fig. 2.14), which they superficially resemble, the difference is readily ap-
parent. Flaxman’s compositions are decidedly planar, with figures rendered in
strict profile and arranged along a single groundline that is unfailingly parallel to
the picture plane. By keeping references to a third dimension at a minimum,
Flaxman was able to make the various poses and the spatial relationships between
figures immediately intelligible. In contrast, the overlappings, foreshortenings,
and other uncertainties of Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations necessarily give
the viewer pause. And it is precisely this vacillation before the image that endows
its figures with the semblance of motion.
The Sacrifice of Polyxena (fig. 2.15) offers yet another variation on this strat-
egy. Although the external contours of Polyxena’s form are complete, just as they
were with the figure of Orpheus, it is difficult to view her silhouette in its to-
tality. The cloth draping from her shoulder and the arm of the man who holds
her each serve to impede our ready comprehension of her form. If we force our-
selves to regard the girl’s figure whole and in isolation, her body appears wildly
distorted, an aggregate of aspects completely lacking in “organic unity.”19 Un-
der these conditions, Polyxena’s figure recalls the images that Leo Steinberg has
brought to our attention—those Picasso nudes whose erogenous zones all
somehow manage to congregate on the picture plane, and who therefore seem to
offer us simultaneous apprehension of their every aspect (fig. 2.16).20 However,
34 the Polyxena illustration actually discourages us from seeing her figure in this way.
– The image’s complexity, in combination with its broad, unmodulated expanses,
35 makes the girl’s form difficult to isolate at a glance, with the result that we are
2.14
John Flaxman, Thetis Finds Achilles Mourning over the Body of Patroclus, illustration
for Iliad, 1793.
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).
Picasso, La Coiffure, 1954.

2.16
38
– 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

on the follow-through.21
The most audacious use of this strategy, however, appears in Hercules Slay-
ing the Centaur Nessus (fig. 2.18). In that etching, Picasso set out to render noth-
ing less than Hercules’s complete about-face—a full 180-degree turn—by
splicing together front and rear views along the contour of the hero’s (rather
awkward) left arm.22 The effect of movement is aided by the size of the illustra-
tion within the book23 and the fact that the viewer, holding it in hand, is simply
too close to absorb all of the image at a glance. Instead he must scan the work,
thereby encountering its various aspects in succession. Interestingly enough, in the
margin of the original copper plate, directly beneath the image of Hercules, Pi-
casso sketched a small figure intently gazing at an open book (fig. 2.19).24 Al-
though perhaps a portrait of his nine-year-old son, the sketch also serves to
indicate that the final context for the Hercules and Nessus, and therefore the condi-
tions under which it would be seen, were very much on Picasso’s mind. Despite
the look of spontaneity to the final etching, Picasso seems to have carefully
weighed the circumstances of its reception, in an effort to decide just how far the
contours—and thus the temporal dimension—of a single figure might plaus-
ibly be extended.25
More was at stake here than simply a clever response to the challenges of
narrative illustration. For it was precisely art’s temporal dimension that had been
denied by critics and aestheticians ever since the eighteenth century and the writ-
ings of Lessing. Perhaps Zervos was thinking of the Metamorphoses illustrations
specifically when he wrote, in the context of a general discussion of Picasso’s
classicism, that the artist “had given the lie to the opinion of Lessing, which ex-
pressly reserved for painting and sculpture the role of description in order to
impart to poetry the dual tasks of evocation and animation.”26 Lessing had built
his opposition of poetry and painting around the presumption of instantaneous
vision, the belief that works of art are wholly present to their viewer in, literally,
the blink of an eye.27 It was a model of perception whose logic required that
those works of art be unified and complete, since any nonunifying element, any
40
– 2.18
41 Picasso, Hercules Slaying Nessus, 1930 (September 20).
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
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-

pal collaborator—Peter Paul Rubens—entirely unacknowledged.33
Rubens was commissioned in 1636 to produce a large series of paintings
based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of
Philip IV of Spain. Ultimately the artist executed only a small fraction of the
paintings himself, though he did furnish all of the oil sketches on which the
larger, finished works were based.34 As Svetlana Alpers has noted, these composi-
tions are unusual among Ovidian paintings both in the subjects chosen and in
the frankly narrative manner of their presentation. Rubens passed over nearly all
of the myths that had a long tradition in monumental, allegorical painting, look-
ing instead for his models to woodcuts and engravings from published editions
of the Metamorphoses.35 The appearance of many of those same lesser-known and
infrequently depicted stories among Picasso’s Ovidian etchings marks them as
the third link in this chain.
In all likelihood, Picasso had been aware of Rubens’s compositions for
some time, conceivably since childhood. Most of the fifty surviving oil sketches
were preserved in Spanish collections (the majority in the Prado, where the full-
scale paintings from the Torre de la Parada were also displayed). In fact, two of
the sketches ended up in the provincial museum at La Coruña, the Galician town
where Picasso spent his adolescence while his father taught drawing and design
at the local school of art.36
In the fall of 1930, just as work was beginning on the Metamorphoses illus-
trations, an article appeared in the Archivo español de arte that may have jogged Pi-
casso’s memory of the Torre de la Parada compositions.37 The article included
two illustrations, the first of Rubens’s Procris and Cephalus sketch, the second of
the finished painting made after it by Peeter Symons (figs. 2.21, 2.22). Even if
the Archivo español reproductions were not the immediate source, those two paint-
ings clearly provided the models for Picasso’s own illustration of the myth (fig.
2.23). The proof lies not only in Cephalus’s gesturing left hand—an element
taken directly from the earlier compositions—but also, and most tellingly, in the
bow that he carries in his right. If Picasso had consulted Ovid’s narrative alone,
2.21
Rubens, Procris and Cephalus, 1636.
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.
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

truly metamorphic nature of Picasso’s illustrations.
The fact that those few remaining vestiges point specifically to Rubens’s
work is important as well. One need only recall the long-lived debate in France
between the proponents of Rubens and those of Poussin, and to see how often
the name of the latter was admiringly invoked in criticism of the late 1910s and
1920s, to appreciate the significance of Picasso’s choice of models. If Poussin
was the great exemplar of French classicism, Rubens was considered the quin-
tessentially baroque artist.39 And as the fortunes of classicism rose during the
interwar years, the popularity of all things baroque correspondingly declined.
The essay by Theo van Doesburg discussed earlier, his “Classique-Baroque-
Moderne,” was but one of the more explicit statements of a sentiment widely
held. Van Doesburg, it will be remembered, drew a sharp (and qualitative) dis-
tinction between the classical and the modern, based on their degree of abstrac-
tion and “independence from nature.” However, he placed both of these styles in
opposition to the “degeneracy” of baroque art. The classical and the modern, ac-
cording to van Doesburg, each exemplify the harmonious display of aesthetic
essences, whereas those essences are blatantly disregarded by the baroque: “The
baroque is based essentially on a disharmonious relation, through the predomi-
nance . . . of natural, capricious forms and through the arbitrary exaggeration of
those forms.”40 It privileges the fleeting and accidental, he felt, at the expense of
the transcendent.
The qualities that elicited van Doesburg’s disapproval seem to have been
precisely those that attracted Picasso to the baroque art of Rubens. The Meta-
morphoses illustrations emphasize the “capricious” and “arbitrary” features of the
Torre de la Parada paintings, focusing on their exaggerated gestures and compo-
sitional “disharmonies” to the point that, in The Fall of Phaethon, “accident” be-
comes the very theme of the image (fig. 2.24). The story itself, of course, revolves
around the upheaval resulting from Phaethon’s inability to keep Apollo’s char-
iot under control and on its median course across the sky.41 Taking the Torre de
la Parada illustration of the myth as his starting point (fig. 2.25), Picasso
50
– 2.24
51 Picasso, The Fall of Phaethon, 1930 (September 20).
Rubens, The Fall of Phaethon, 1636.

2.25
condensed the already compact, chaotic arrangement into an utter tangle of
limbs. The image’s “Etruscan engraving” style—and especially its lack of any
color or modeling that might help us to distinguish one figure from another, or
either of those from ground—further intensifies the apparent confusion of the
scene. In this sense, that “Etruscan” style is perfectly matched to the etching’s
baroque compositional borrowings from Rubens; each invokes an artistic tradi-
tion fully engaged with classical antiquity yet displaying few of the traits deemed
essentially classical by twentieth-century critics.
From Rubens’s Death of Eurydice, Picasso singled out the awkward, knees-
together pose of the dying bride and accentuated its ungainliness (figs. 2.26,
2.27). In a further affront to “classical” aesthetics, he simultaneously trans-
formed the pose into an image of movement, a record of Eurydice’s swoon and
collapse. His metamorphosis of the rest of the composition was even more com-
plete. Most noticeably, Picasso replaced Rubens’s figure of Orpheus with four of
Eurydice’s naiad companions, thus bringing the illustration into better accord
with Ovid’s description of the event.42 Picasso eliminated all references to land-
scape, and kept only the snakish line near Eurydice’s left arm as a reminder of
Rubens’s coiling serpent. In a certain, rather ironic sense, these radical changes
yielded an image even more “baroque” than the original composition. In van
Doesburg’s estimation at least, the “disharmony” of baroque art was caused by
just this sort of arbitrary and idiosyncratic appropriation. To his mind, baroque
artists had been distracted by the superficialities and extraneous details of the
work they emulated, and in the process overlooked its essence. Not only was all
sense of “organic unity” thereby lost, but “tradition” was reduced to mere quo-
tation, without any presumption of a deeper stylistic affinity. “The baroque be-
came a hotbed of inspiration,” van Doesburg claimed, “but at the same time the
end of any pure conception of style. . . . The baroque was a vast storehouse which
any artist could ransack as he pleased.”43
52 Picasso continued to “ransack” the Torre de la Parada paintings for any-
– thing that struck his fancy or filled a particular need. He stole the struggling war-
53 riors from the lower right corner of Rubens’s Cadmus and Minerva (fig. 2.28);
Rubens, The Death of Eurydice, 1636.

2.26
54
– 2.27
55 Picasso, The Death of Eurydice, 1930 (October 11).
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-

called Deucalion and Pyrrha Creating a New Human Race (fig. 2.30), there are likewise
discrepancies between the image and its given title, and again the discrepancies
point to a complicated relation to Rubens’s work for the Torre de la Parada. Ac-
cording to Ovid’s account, Deucalion and Pyrrha were an old couple, unable to
bear children and thus to repopulate the world after it had been destroyed by
flood. In the text, Deucalion and Pyrrha go to Parnassus to consult the oracle of
Themis, which tells them—obliquely, as oracles are wont to do—to descend
from the temple, casting stones behind them.
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).
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.
indispensable figures of Deucalion and Pyrrha—indeed, omitting everything

that remained from Peruzzi’s initial design—he focused exclusively on the right-
hand side of the painting and on Rubens’s newly (re-)created human race. See-
ing a resemblance to children in the smaller, still-developing stone/figures of
Rubens’s painting, Picasso transformed the group yet again, making it into a nu-
clear family. In his illustration, the man, still kneeling, now inclines his head af-
fectionately toward his son, while the woman (already long-haired in Rubens’s
60 composition) has her hair combed by a second child.
– It is tempting to interpret Picasso’s etching as a comment on its own com-
61 plex heritage, by seeing the themes of tradition and artistic “metamorphosis” al-
legorically figured in the imagery itself. Ovid’s explicit comparison of Deucalion

and Pyrrha’s metamorphosing “offspring” to works of art taking shape would
provide a precedent of sorts. But Picasso’s anomalous representation of those
offspring as a family of parents and children could be seen as extending the an-
alogy, encouraging us to think of the transformed images in truly generational
terms. Such an analogy would imply that new works of art are related to their pre-
cursors (in this case, to Rubens’s and Peruzzi’s images) like the different gener-
ations of a family: not by some stable essence or ever-inherited trait, but by a
disparate set of similarities that vary from one generation to the next.
Coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time that Picasso was working
on his Deucalion and Pyrrha illustration, Ludwig Wittgenstein was delivering a se-
ries of lectures at Cambridge University that included an attack on essentialist
thinking couched in remarkably similar terms (we can make the terms even more
similar by substituting the phrase “work of art” wherever Wittgenstein speaks of
“games”):
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
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
Rubens, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1636.

2.35
2.36
Meleager Painter, kylix depicting Dionysus and Ariadne, c. 475 B.C.
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
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
Much to Delaunay’s pique, Picasso proceeded as if there were no “funda-

mental laws” or aesthetic essences governing his appropriation of the past. In-
stead, like a bricoleur, he scavenged tradition for useful types, taking whatever
could be made to suit his immediate needs. In works like the Vertumnus and Pomona,
where the borrowed elements are precisely those that most strongly suggest tem-
poral duration and nonsimultaneity, the offense is only compounded. There the
accepted timelessness of both the individual image and artistic tradition as a
whole are blatantly flouted.
68 Throughout the interwar period, much of the critical and theoretical writ-
– ing on art—and even, in many instances, the images themselves—had been
69 aimed at asserting a constant, universal, essentialist vision. Nowhere was this
more true than in the area of “classical” art, with its accrued associations of time-

lessness and eternal values. But Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations put forth an
alternative image, an image of a metamorphic classicism whose strength lay not in
its fixedness but in its flexibility, its openness to accommodation and change. Al-
though the particular “dynamic devices” of the Ovid illustrations would not ap-
pear again in Picasso’s oeuvre, the view of classicism and the classical tradition
they had helped to embody was one that the artist would continue to explore,
most searchingly in his graphic work of the next several years.
3
The Structure of the Vollard Suite
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
the structure of the vollard suite

and dark, unevenly bitten tones. In fact, the plates of the Vollard Suite were so
heterogeneous that, for a long time, its very status as a “suite” was called into
question.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Ambroise Vollard—the
publisher who had acquired the plates from Picasso and overseen their print-
ing—died in an automobile accident before any of the sets could be released for
sale.1 For many years, they simply accumulated dust in Vollard’s storeroom. Fi-
nally, in 1948, a Parisian dealer named Henri Petiet bought the prints from the
Vollard estate. Even though all of the images had been printed on identical, spe-
cially prepared sheets of paper, Petiet felt that the plates were simply too diverse,
their production too intermittent, for them to have been intended as a single set.
Referring to them simply as “cent estampes originales,” he frequently broke the
suites apart in order to sell smaller groups and sometimes even individual prints.2
It was only after 1956, when Hans Bolliger republished the Vollard Suite in
book form, all one hundred images bound together, that scholars seriously be-
gan to consider the prints as an integrated set. “At first sight,” Bolliger conceded,
“the variety of themes treated might suggest incoherence. However, when the
sheets are exhibited all together, one is struck by their unity of underlying im-
plication and tone.”3 Yet the unity that Bolliger had promised would appear
through such a comprehensive exhibition never quite materialized. The book did
manage to convey a remarkable degree of order, by virtue of the fact that the
plates were divided into several thematically unified groups: “Rembrandt,” “The
Minotaur,” “The Blind Minotaur,” “The Sculptor’s Studio,” “The Battle of
Love.” Over a quarter of the images, however, did not easily fit into any of these
categories and so were presented, rather awkwardly, as “miscellaneous” remain-
der. Even more troubling, the book’s thematic divisions threatened to create the
impression that the “suite” consisted of, not one hundred essentially independ-
ent plates as Petiet saw it, but several independent groups. In all, the book’s for-
mat did little to substantiate (and might even be seen to have undermined)
Bolliger’s assertion of the Suite’s overall coherence.
One aim of the present chapter will thus be to offer a reassessment of the
Vollard Suite—a new estimation of exactly how, and to what extent, its various
plates are related. If, as seems to be the case, the Suite does not comprise a unified
whole, is it possible to see it nonetheless as a single, cohesive group? How might
we best describe the structure of that group, and what would be its implications
for our understanding and experience of individual prints? The attempt to an-
swer these questions will inevitably lead us back to issues of classicism and clas-
sical art as those were articulated throughout the late twenties and thirties. For
no less than the Metamorphoses illustrations, the Vollard Suite issues a challenge to
received notions of classicism; but it does so more subtly, less directly, and—per-
haps most importantly—it does so at the level of structure.
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
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).
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).
3.8
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
3.9
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

situation is in no way exceptional; everywhere we look within the Suite we find
similar cross references between supposedly distinct categories. Indeed, were we
to try to map out all of the Vollard plates’ many interconnections, the result would
look less like the separate thematic strands suggested in Bolliger’s publication
than like the intricate mesh of a spider’s web.
Plate 89 of the “Minotaur” series (fig. 3.12) provides further illustration
of the point. That image—of a young “Theseus” slaying the Minotaur before a
crowd of spectators—is obviously related to the Suite’s several “miscellaneous”
bullfight scenes, via not only the Minotaur’s taurine features but also the arena-
like setting (rather than the expected labyrinth) in which the event takes place.
Moreover, although that event seems far removed from the milieu of the “Sculp-
tor’s Studio,” in plate 70 of the “Studio” series (fig. 3.13) the sculptor can be
seen applying the finishing touches to a statuette that looks to be the very model
of plate 89’s young hero. The Minotaur himself actually turns up within the
sculptor’s studio in the early plates of the “Minotaur” series; in one of them (fig.
3.14) he even raises a toast, roughly echoing the more pious, libational gesture
of the sculpted “Theseus.”6
Were we to group the plates according to shared stylistic or technical fea-
tures, still other subsets would emerge; and these, too, would not coincide with
the series that Bolliger’s publication established. Even from the few examples al-
ready discussed, it should be clear that the Vollard Suite is not merely a collection
of distinct thematic groups; there are too many connections between plates with
different “themes.” Yet neither can the Suite be said to comprise a unified whole,
3.10
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 54 (March 30, 1933).
3.11
3.12
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 89 (May 29, 1933).
3.13
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 70 (April 11, 1933).
82
–
83
3.14
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.

When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they
all “amusing”? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning or los-
ing or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games there is winning and
losing; but when a child throws his ball at a wall and catches it again, this feature has disap-
peared. . . . And we can go through many, many other groups of games in the same way; can
see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of the examination is this: we see a complicated network of similarities
overlapping and criss-crossing; sometimes overall similarities and sometimes similarities of
detail.
I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family re-
semblances”; for the various resemblances between the members of a family: build, features,
colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I
shall say: “games” form a family.7
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-
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
to etching and drypoint, but here, apparently challenged by Goya’s example, he

produced one of the most technically ambitious works of the entire Vollard Suite.12
Sketching the figures first in a varnish resist to stop out the bite of the acid, Pi-
casso created a negative or reverse image that beautifully captures the dark mys-
tery characteristic of Goya’s series.13
The Suite’s allusions to the prints of Callot and Goya are allusions, respec-
tively, to the beginning and the grand finale of the capriccio tradition. Together
88 they form quotation marks around the entire genre, designating the whole as
– precedent. It is perhaps not too much, then, to say that the Vollard plates are Pi-
89 casso’s Caprichos, and thus his bid to revive a tradition that had lain dormant for
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.
3.18
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-

fied composition of Minerva’s weaving, with which it is compared, Arachne’s
tapestry presents a bewildering array of narrative scenes strung together in
apparently haphazard fashion. There is no recognizable pattern, only a spider’s
web of stories linked by loose association. Arachne’s work, like the Metamorphoses
itself, violates nearly all of the Aristotelian criteria for unity. In neither tapestry
nor poem do the elements follow as inevitable (or even probable) consequences
of everything that has preceded. Nor would the integrity of either work suffer
much, as Aristotle felt it should, were a number of its episodes to be transposed
or removed.20 These were criteria that in Ovid’s own day, as in the 1930s, were
considered hallmarks of classical epic. But Ovid explicitly rejected the “organic,”
Aristotelian unity typified by works such as Virgil’s Aeneid in favor of an aggrega-
tive collection of complexly interrelated stories.
It seems likely that Picasso’s decision to begin work on an extended series
of prints (when he had never been much of a printmaker before) was motivated
by a similar determination. Like Arachne’s tapestry, the capriccio format he
adopted provided a close visual analogue to the “anticlassical” structure of Ovid’s
poem—a radically nonunified group of images held together by an intricate web
of parallels and associations.
The Suite, however, has a decided advantage over the Metamorphoses (or, for
that matter, Arachne’s composition): because its plates are unbound, the work
can be continually rearranged, the better to draw out its many interconnections.
Shuffling through the prints, we are made to see that the Suite, for all its bril-
liance, is not a “profound” work—or rather, that its brilliance lies precisely in its
shallowness. Whenever we might be tempted to look behind one of the Vollard im-
ages for a deeper, hidden level of meaning, we are drawn back, by our awareness
of its associations with others, to the very surface of the suite.21 This continual
displacement of our attention from print to print recreates, at least in general
form, the pattern of the Suite’s production, so that Picasso’s comments regard-
ing a similar instance of serial variation seem no less appropriate here: the im-
ages’ fascination, he said, lies precisely in that they preserve the movement of
thought “from one vision to the next.” “I have reached the stage,” he added by way
of explanation, “where the movement of my thought interests me more than the
thought itself.”22
These comments by Picasso serve to direct our attention in turn to an im-
portant affinity between the Vollard Suite and the surrealists’ contemporaneous ex-
periments with what they called “psychic automatism.” The latter had been
equated by Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism with surrealism at large, and
defined as any practice whereby “one proposes to express—verbally, by means of
the written word, or in any other manner [including, as Breton would later make
clear, painting and drawing]—the actual functioning of thought.”23 Not, we
should hasten to add, logical or conscious thought; Breton’s interest in automa-
tism was based in the belief that, by relaxing purposive or directed control over
the text or image being made, its production would be guided instead by the un-
conscious. Although the feasibility of automatism in general met with a good
deal of skepticism, even from within the surrealist circle itself, the greatest doubt
was reserved for the specific practices of automatic painting and drawing. At the
heart of the controversy was the belief, by now familiar to us, that the visual arts
are essentially atemporal, and that the individual work is therefore given for in-
stantaneous apprehension. Even those who advocated the extension of surrealist
practices to the visual arts tended to frame their case around these terms. Max
Morise, for example, writing in the very first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, con-
ceded that de Chirico’s paintings, championed by some as the very model of sur-
realist art, were in truth ill suited to the movement’s stated goals. The problem,
he implied, lay with their transfixing stillness (pronounced in works by de
Chirico but endemic to the medium itself ) and with the conflicting fact that the
“stream of thought cannot be viewed statically.”24 Pictorial automatism, Morise
suggested, by diverting attention from the finished work to the process of its
making, offered a way around the problem—provided, that is, that the limita-
94 tions of the medium nonetheless be respected. The process of making should re-
– main relatively brief in duration, he felt, and the image correspondingly restricted
95 to recording only “the most imperceptible undulations in the flux of thought.”25
Even these provisos, however, were insufficient for Pierre Naville, who two

issues later in La Révolution surréaliste unequivocally declared, “There is no surreal-
ist painting. Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to the accident of gesture,
nor the image retracing the forms of the dream, nor imaginative fantasies, of
course, can be described.”26 Although much of Naville’s opposition sprang from
his belief that painting was a fundamentally bourgeois practice, some also seems
to have been rooted in his sense that the medium was too static to either capture
or convey “the actual functioning of [unconscious] thought.” Naville himself
saw far more surrealist potential in cinema, with its constant transformation of
images.
Morise and Naville’s assertion of the dynamic nature of unconscious
thought no doubt derived, at least in part, from the surrealists’ reading of Freud.
As early as in his 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud had begun de-
scribing a mode of mental functioning—he dubbed it the “primary process”—
that was completely different from the more ordered, stable, and linear processes
regulating preconscious and conscious thought. It involved a kind of relational
frenzy, a perpetual free association of ideas. Dreams, Freud felt, afforded perhaps
the best opportunity to track its operations. In analyzing the manifest content
of his patients’ and his own dreams, Freud repeatedly discovered that each aspect
of the dream was indirectly connected to the others with which it appeared via an
intricate network of variously related, latent ideas (or “dream-thoughts”). For
example, where his own Dream of the Botanical Monograph was concerned,
Freud was able to chart a host of associations—from a distant memory of once
finding bookworms in a herbarium to a recent conversation with a professor
named Gärtner (Gardener) and the recollection of a festschrift with which the
latter had been involved—all apparently underlying the dream’s conjunction of
botany and books.27 Freud envisioned such associative complexes as analogous
to (or perhaps even coincident with) neuronal networks, the links among the
separate dream-thoughts serving as conduits for the transfer of psychic energy.
First set in motion by the wish or desire that was the initial impetus for the
dream, this energy was displaced from idea to idea in search of fulfillment, with
those ideas or components most frequently “cathected” thereby gaining entry
into the content of the dream. “It will be seen,” Freud remarked, “that the chief
characteristic [of the primary process] is that the whole stress is laid upon mak-
ing cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and proper
meaning of the psychical elements to which the cathexes are attached are treated
as of little consequence.”28
Again, it was this constant mobility of unconscious thought, the restless-
ness of its desiring energy, that led Morise to question, and Naville to deny, its
compatibility with the medium of painting. Importantly, however, neither man
argued the incompatibility of the unconscious with images at large; as The Inter-
pretation of Dreams makes abundantly evident, Freud considered images endemic to
the primary process. He repeatedly claimed that the unconscious selects for the
dream’s content not only those ideas that have the strongest and most numerous
associative links with others, but also those that exist as (or most easily trans-
late into) images. “Of the various subsidiary thoughts attached to the essential
dream-thoughts,” he emphasized, “those will be preferred which admit of visual
representation.”29 In Freud’s own visual representations of the kinds of relational
processes governing unconscious thought (such as the diagram reproduced here
as figure 3.19), the reasons for that preference are made clear: in contrast to the
relatively stable and circumscribed associations provoked by the aural and
scripted forms of a given concept, its visual representation was seen to generate
an elaborate network of “object associations,” a veritable spider’s web of related
images and ideas.
As if in confirmation of this point, Freud’s diagram itself evokes a host of
associations; most importantly for us, it calls to mind both the structure of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and, nearer at hand, that of the Vollard Suite. It makes us
aware, in short, that both the poem and the print series are homologous with the
Freudian unconscious. Indeed, it allows us to see that, in their viewing as in their
96 making, the Vollard plates effectively model the operations of the primary process
– and the restlessness of its motivating desire.
97
3.19
Sigmund Freud, “Psychological schema for the word-concept,” from Zur Auffassung der
Aphasien, 1891.
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

fact, to properly situate the “Studio” plates, it seems necessary at the start to
move outside of the Suite altogether, contrasting the series with yet another group
of etchings to which it is often compared: Picasso’s 1927 illustrations for Bal-
zac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu.30
The theme of the artist’s studio, which dominates those illustrations (and,
in truth, provides their only consistent link to Balzac’s text), is shared, obviously,
by the “Studio” series of the Vollard Suite (see figs. 3.20–3.23). There are as well
certain stylistic similarities between the two print series. Yet the total absence of
hatching from most of the Vollard “Studio” plates aligns those works much more
closely with the style of ancient vase painting and engraving. Their figures’ nu-
dity and idealized features are conspicuously classicizing, too, as are the vine-leaf
garlands and Doric pedestal that are present in many of the scenes. In compari-
son, the elements of the Balzac illustrations seem pointedly disparate, alluding
at once to many periods and none. Where they, as a result, seem to offer gener-
alized comment on the making of art, the prints of the Vollard series address in-
stead the particularities of classicism.
Juxtaposition with the Balzac etchings points up yet another significant
characteristic of the Vollard “Studio” series: its classical artist is neither a painter,
as in most of the illustrations for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, nor a printmaker, as the
self-reflexive nature of the imagery might lead us to expect. He is always a clas-
sical sculptor.
If initially surprising, there is yet a sense in which the Suite’s identification
of classicism with sculpture is perfectly apt. During the 1930s, classicism was
most prevalent in the practice of sculpture, and the most popular contemporary
sculptors—artists such as Maillol, Bourdelle, and Despiau—were working in a
strongly classicizing vein.31 The situation was in part a reflection of the fact that,
while not a single major work of Greek painting had survived from antiquity,
examples of ancient statuary had been known and admired for centuries. Be-
cause of this accident of fate, sculpture had long been thought of as normative for
classical art, and classicism was frequently defined in relation to properties
100
–
101
3.20

Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 4, 1927.
3.21
Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 7, 1927.
3.22
102
– 3.23
103 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 45 (March 23, 1933).
considered intrinsically sculptural. Such was the case, for example, in the Aesthet-

ics of Hegel, whose description of Greco-Roman art seems very much of a piece
with the view of sculpture that predominated during the interwar period. The as-
sertion that “sculpture is the art proper to the classical ideal”32 served as the very
linchpin of Hegel’s text, which aimed to describe a history of art through the
shifting hierarchies of its various mediums and forms. In contrast to the sculp-
ture-dominated aesthetics of the classical era, the romantic period that followed
was characterized, Hegel claimed, by the ascendancy of painting, music, and lit-
erature—characterized, that is, both by the preeminence of other art forms and
by the dispersion of that preeminence among them. There is a sense, then, in
which the Aesthetics holds up classical sculpture as the apogee of the visual arts in
general and even as a kind of timeless ideal (however passé). “Sculpture tran-
scends itself,” Hegel noted disapprovingly, “when it becomes an expression of the
romantic art-form, and only when it takes to imitating Greek sculpture does it
acquire its proper plastic type again.”33
The revival and strength of such views during the interwar years is espe-
cially well attested in an essay by the novelist and critic Jules Romains that ap-
peared in the April 1930 issue of the journal Formes. In that essay Romains sought
to draw a distinction between the art of Rodin and Maillol via a series of oppo-
sitions that in the end “seem to be epitomized in a single pair: romanticism–clas-
sicism.”34 Beginning with a line of reasoning that at first seems drawn straight
from Lessing, the writer condemned Rodin’s interest in the representation of
fleeting emotions and movement, while he praised Maillol’s “search for equilib-
rium and stasis.” As the essay unfolds, however, it becomes clear that Rodin’s art
is held to be flawed, and therefore unclassical, because it is deemed inappropri-
ate to the material essence of not the visual arts in general but sculpture in
particular:
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
In making these claims, Romains was implicitly endorsing the Hegelian

view that a work of sculpture is (or should be) complete and utterly self-
sufficient, whereas a painting exists “not independently on its own account but
for subjective apprehension, for the spectator.”36 The assumption is, of course,
that painting is essentially illusionistic, and therefore dependent upon the
viewer’s constitutive role. So too, Romains felt, was Rodin’s art, with its strong
“pictorialism” and other “romantically” subjective effects. But sculpture, by the
very logic of its materials, ought to avoid all such forms of illusionism, since it
is in fact fully three-dimensional, fully objective. It exists entirely apart from the
viewer and without regard to his or her presence before it. That, so the argument
went, was the key to its inherent classicism, as it was only through its resolute
separateness that the classical statue could reflect back to the viewer an image of
his or her own ideal wholeness and autonomy.
Again, Romains’s essay is important chiefly because it articulates with ex-
ceptional clarity beliefs that were influential and widely held at the time. In fact
an astonishingly similar view of sculpture—as complete and self-sufficient—
emerges from the Vollard “Studio” plates. One of the most conspicuous differ-
ences among those plates concerns the level of the sculptor’s involvement with
his work. A few of the images (figs. 3.13, 3.22, 3.29) depict him in the actual
process of carving or modeling, but in the vast majority (e.g., figs. 3.10, 3.11,
3.23, 3.27, 3.28, 3.30–3.34) he simply sits transfixed, gazing from some dis-
tance at his already completed work. Plates 39 and 45 (figs. 3.22 and 3.23, re-
104 spectively) are fairly representative of these two strains. In the former, the
– sculptor is presented as still actively engaged with his work, carefully touching
105 up the bust’s sculpted features. His physical involvement is further emphasized
(particularly in comparison with the figure of plate 45) by the lateral extension

of his face. Its sideways elongation suggests—in a manner not so very different
from that used with the Metamorphoses illustrations—a gradual turning through
space, as though the sculptor were slowly working his way around the sculpture,
all the while keeping his eyes trained upon it. In plate 45, by contrast, the sculp-
tor, hunched over, his chin in his hands, merely stares at the carved classical head
from which he now seems quite removed. The model by his side is more actively
engaged with the work; but although she reaches out to the statue, it stares back
unresponsively from pupilless eyes, oblivious to the spectator, as Romains argued
it should be.37 If the sculpted head of plate 39 also lacks pupils with which to re-
ciprocate its viewers’ gaze, it nonetheless seems fully connected to them by a ra-
diating aura that bridges the distance between.38
To reiterate: the vast majority of the Vollard “Studio” plates are like num-
ber 45 in that the sculpture is depicted as complete and self-sufficient, with the
sculptor (no less than his model) relegated to the role of merely looking on. In
fewer than a third of the prints is the situation otherwise. And, given the differ-
ential structure of the “Studio” series, even those exceptional images serve to re-
inforce, rather than to mitigate, the message of the majority. That is, the few
plates in which the sculptor remains in close physical contact with his work ac-
tually emphasize, through their contrast, his separateness in the majority of in-
stances. More than that, it is the presence of those exceptional plates that makes
that separateness significant.
Once we are made aware of this general opposition between the active and
passive sculptors of the “Studio” series, other images seem to emerge and mark
(in one way or another) their similarity or difference from these. A prime ex-
ample is plate 26 (fig. 3.7). One of a group of images depicting a female nude
fast asleep and watched over by a wakeful male,39 the plate differs markedly from
the etchings of the “Studio” series in style, setting, and dramatis personae. Yet its
similarity with the series turns precisely on the relationship between those charac-
ters—specifically, on the distance between viewing figure and viewed. In an evoc-
ative essay on Picasso’s “sleepwatchers,” Leo Steinberg noted that the treatment
of the motif within the Vollard Suite differs substantially from its appearance in
earlier works of art. Where traditionally the “sleepwatch” had represented “un-
planned or delicious encounters”—all sorts of opportunities for the intruder—
the advantage is reversed in the Vollard prints. There,
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
In the self-containment of the sleeping nude, her obliviousness to the

watchful youth, and the resultant physical and emotional distance between them,
plate 26 echoes the main themes of the “Sculptor’s Studio.” Indeed, as Wendy
Steiner has remarked in reference to the Vollard plates, the sleepwatch motif has
long served, in both painting and literature, as a metaphor for the relationship
between art and its audience.41 That it functions so within the Vollard Suite, how-
ever, is due less to the existence of that tradition than to the simultaneous pres-
ence of the thematically related “Studio” plates. When the two groups of images
are seen side by side, it is evident that the “sleepwatch” scenes are transformations
of the “Sculptor’s Studio”—in much the same sense that Lévi-Strauss spoke of
the “transformational” relationship between different myths possessing similar
meanings.42 A number of pentimenti in plate 26 bear out this observation: there,
in the area of the boy’s chin, the features of another face and a beard, nearly bur-
nished out, still linger on the plate. It seems that, initially, the sleepwatcher’s po-
sition was occupied by none other than the Suite’s classical sculptor.
This replacement of figures—the excluded youth of plate 26 for the dis-
interested artist of the “Studio” series—reflects back in important ways upon
106 the latter plates, throwing that disinterest into question and suggesting as well
– a certain interchangeability between the artist’s model and his sculpture. Both of
107 these implications are further strengthened by the presence within the Suite of the
plates that Bolliger referred to as the “Battle of Love” (see figs. 3.24–3.26). At

first glance, those plates would seem to have nothing in common with the “Sculp-
tor’s Studio.” Each of the five “Battle” images depicts a couple in the throes of
sexual passion: bodies entangled, mouths open—in all, a far cry from the visible
quiescence of the “Studio” scenes. But this difference between the two series is
not merely difference; it is direct opposition, and it operates on a number of lev-
els. Whereas figures in the “Sculptor’s Studio” are characterized by a certain air
of detachment, those in the “Battle of Love” seem anything but detached. By the
same token, where vision dominates relations within the “Studio,” the “Lovers”
are pressed too close for sight; they shut their eyes tightly or stare without see-
ing. Although these features are plainly there in the prints, they are brought to
the fore only through a comparison of the two series. Those series are, in effect,
polar complements, mutually defining each other in their opposition. Confirma-
tion is to be had from plate 28 (fig. 3.24), the earliest of the Suite’s five “Battle”
scenes. In the upper lefthand corner of that image, a window sill and vase of flow-
ers—much as appear throughout the “Studio” series (see figs. 3.23, 3.27, 3.28,
3.30, 3.31, and 3.32)—are clearly visible. Their inclusion in this plate links the
“Battle” with the sculptor’s studio, and thus its frenzied lovers with the studio’s
own, more subdued occupants.
The opposition with the “Battle of Love” is drawn most sharply, perhaps,
in plate 51 of the “Sculptor’s Studio” (fig. 3.27), where the statue itself is a
voluptuous, full-length female nude. The effect of substituting that standing
figure for the sculpted heads of the earlier compositions is to introduce into the
studio the possibilty of an erotic relationship between the work and its audience.
And yet that possibility remains conspicuously unrealized. The sculpted figure
makes absolutely no concessions to her audience’s presence; she is, to borrow
Michael Fried’s terminology, thoroughly nontheatrical. What’s more, her evident
disregard for her viewers is countered by a dispassionate response from them. So
ethereal is the model’s contemplation that she seems little more than a disem-
bodied gaze. The sculptor’s attitude is registered in turn by his recumbent pose,
and even more by the position of his right hand. Its placement near his genitals
3.24
Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 28 (April 1933).
3.25
108
– 3.26
109 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 31 (April 23, 1933).
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

all that it raises, however, it functions mostly to point up his nondesirous rela-
tion to the statue, a corollary of its distinct disregard for him.
The similarity here with generally Hegelian views of the classical is again
worth remarking. Hegel, too, insisted that the viewer stand in intellectual or spir-
itual contemplation before the work of art, relating to it without desire. The ra-
tionale was fairly straightforward: desire poses a clear threat to the wholeness
and autonomy of work and viewer alike. Under its sway, the work is perceived as
a mere consumable, there only for the viewer’s satisfaction.
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
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

knowledge.”45 The experience of the “Sculptor’s Studio” plates is much differ-
ent. The generally smaller scale of their figures, together with their more clari-
fied forms, seems to place the viewer at a much greater remove. The difference is
pointedly brought to our attention with plate 58, in which the sculpture is po-
sitioned at the very center of the composition—about midway back into the rep-
resented space—while the sculptor and model look on from the far wall of the
studio. As a consequence of this arrangement, a certain symmetry is created be-
tween the sculptor and his model and ourselves; their position in regard to the
statue now mirrors our own (and, perhaps even more to the point, Picasso’s). We
are all cast in the role of mere onlooker.
Occasionally within the Vollard Suite we find images that frame the rela-
tionships between the sculpture and the etching and their respective artists in
less passive terms; one such example is Plate 59 (fig. 3.29). That plate’s most
distinctive feature is the oddly separate treatment of its two halves: the right is
rendered in the simplified classical style familiar from the other “Studio” plates,
while the left side is covered in a dense thicket of line. Closer observation reveals
yet another inconsistency between the two halves, in the sculptor’s respective
views of his model and his work. The two are 90 degrees out of phase, so that al-
though the model stands facing him, he views the sculpted figure in profile. The
result is that the artist’s position relative to his work is made identical with
ours—and Picasso’s—relative to the model. Here is where the handling of that
left half becomes significant, because it emphasizes that area as an etching and
thereby recalls Picasso’s presence before the plate as its artist. From the curved
lines on the model’s body that suggest the fullness of her form to the hatching
and cross-hatching and patterned designs of the background, the evident free-
dom and spontaneiy of Picasso’s strokes calls attention to the process of etching,
in parallel with the process of sculpting actually depicted on the right. In each
case the emphasis is on the artist’s physical involvement with his work—his
hands-on approach, as it were, to the female form.
3.29
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-
3.30
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
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-

tasmatic projection of both the figure’s and the viewer’s total presence. Picasso
himself, adhering to the fantasy, phrased things this way: at its best, he claimed,
art was “actual lovemaking”48—and this was true for both its initial creation and
its subsequent reception. Little wonder, then, that the nude model of plate 62
should confront her audience with its voyeuristic passivity, or that her counter-
parts in other prints might well expect more ardor from their artist-companions.
The classical sculptor of plate 50 (fig. 3.32), for example, is completely absorbed
in admiration of the statue before him. Although the model feigns to share his
cool fascination, it is only a mask; below it, she casts a furtive and critical eye at
her dispassionate lover.
Elsewhere the sculptor’s neglect of his model is signaled by increasing age.
In plate 63 (fig. 3.33) his wrinkled face and body contrast markedly with the dis-
played voluptuousness of hers.49 The wasted sculptor of number 65 (fig. 3.34)
no longer even absently caresses the beautiful nude whose attention is once again
directed our way; a tunic covers his disinterest. More tellingly still, the sculptor’s
lassitude is suggested by the sculpture at which he stares. In place of the female
head that appears in so many of the plates, we find one that looks suspiciously
like the sculptor in his youth. The head even turns its eyes in his direction, as if
in wistful recognition of their similar fates: both are little more than disembod-
ied gazes, incapable of “actual lovemaking.”
This same sculpted male head appears in several other of the Vollard studio
scenes from which the artist himself is absent. In plate 61 (fig. 3.35) it is en-
larged to such enormous proportions that it stands as a surrogate for the miss-
ing sculptor, and would seem to aspire as well to his role as the model’s lover. Yet,
rooted in place and lacking arms, the head evidently strains to hold her even in
his peripheral vision. Meanwhile she remains aloof, her relaxed stance and casual
tilt of the head mocking his maddening immobility.50
Plate 76 (fig. 3.36), if stylistically different, offers a variation on the same
theme. There the living model has been replaced by a sculpted figure, but one that
is still female, still nude, and still clearly the object of the male head’s scopic
3.32
3.33
118
– 3.34
120
– 3.35
3.36
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-
3.37
124
– 3.38
125 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 34 (January 27, 1934).
position. Even the once-restrained artist is fairly bursting with lecherous enthu-

siasm—though that is perhaps not the most surprising aspect of his appearance.
Unexpectedly, the classical sculptor has been replaced by the wild-eyed figure of
Rembrandt.
Explaining the Dutch artist’s sudden appearance within the Suite, Picasso
told his old friend and dealer D.-H. Kahnweiler that it had been the result of a
kind of spontaneous generation:
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
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
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-
3.43
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,
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

of eyes, one pair leveled at the nude, the other raised to her face. The Rembrandt
figure in plate 36 exhibits a similar degree of ocular abundance: the spare left eye,
a tightly coiled spiral, is placed adjacent to its twin, while the extra one on the
right hides in the bushy eyebrow on that side.66 If taken at face value, the addi-
tional eyes cast into doubt the supposed detachment of the artist’s gaze. In Pi-
casso’s etching—and even Rembrandt’s, when it is viewed in tandem—the two
pairs of eyes seem to trace out the trajectory of a glance that is both embodied
and aroused, which darts to and fro, eager to hit all the high points.
The allusions to Pygmalion, Rembrandt’s reputation, the apparent dou-
bling in the etching of the artist’s eyes, as well as the figure’s complex relation to
the blank canvas behind, and the intimations there of Balzac’s Frenhofer—all
these features are so many loose threads running through The Artist and His Model.
Together they threaten to unravel the etching’s ostensible message of aesthetic
distance. The “Rembrandt” plates of the Vollard Suite, in effect, pull those threads
out for a closer look, revealing the contradictions woven into the very fabric of
the original etching. To phrase things somewhat differently, we might say that
those plates point toward what is typically repressed in interpretations of The
Artist and His Model—or even better, that they encourage us to interpret that etch-
ing as itself staging desire’s censorship or repression. They suggest, that is, that
the artist’s apparent “disinterest” is founded precisely on the active sublimation
of the workings of desire.
In addition, the “Rembrandt” and closely related plates of the Vollard Suite
enable us to see how even the “Battle of Love” could have taken its impetus from
The Artist and His Model—the Pygmalion associations of the latter driving, in the
former, both the emphasis on the artist’s sexual arousal and the condensation
into a single figure of the studio model and sculpture. In fact, given sufficient
time, it would be possible to show that nearly all of the Vollard plates are varia-
tions, or variations on variations, of Rembrandt’s unfinished etching. From the
images of the Minotaur (who, it will be remembered, entered the Suite via the
artist’s studio) to the “miscellaneous” scenes of the circus and bullfight, the
entire series can be seen as the result of a “centrifugal” process of improvisation
leading outward from Rembrandt’s print.67 Thus, to the extent that the Suite can
be said to have a center, that position is occupied by the etching of The Artist and
His Model. Which is to say that the “center” is not actually present among the
pages of the Vollard Suite. Like the spider’s web whose structure it resembles, the
Suite is built around an empty space, a hole. Moreover, this absent center points
in different—and even diametrically opposed—directions, as Picasso’s varia-
tions brilliantly reveal. In their light, it seems clear that what attracted the artist
to Rembrandt’s etching in the first place was its inherent contradiction; that, and
the fact that its subject impinges on classical art. Indeed it appears likely that Pi-
casso was drawn to the Dutch artist, as he had earlier been drawn to Rubens and
the Torre de la Parada compositions, by the eccentric and even subversive vision
of classicism he found there. The Artist and His Model is particularly rich in this re-
gard, because even as it gives overt support to the “classical” ideal of disinterest
on the part of both viewer and viewed, it simultaneously calls attention to the re-
pression (and not merely the absence) of desire upon which that disinterest is
founded.
It is important for us to recognize that the ambivalence of Rembrandt’s
etching does not simply get taken up into the imagery of the Vollard plates. It reg-
isters too, and perhaps even more powerfully, in the structure of the Suite at large,
so that each encounter with the prints, each instance of their viewing, enacts both
the movements of desire and their repeated repression. A brief review here might
help to clarify the claim. Earlier it was argued that the plates of the Suite, bound
as they are to one another by a complex network of associations, offer themselves
as a kind of structural analogue of the Freudian unconscious, and that the pat-
tern of viewing they encourage likewise resembles the desire-driven operations of
the primary process. It was also claimed that the “Sculptor’s Studio” plates and
those most closely associated with them (whether through similarity or outright
136 opposition) are something of an exception in this regard. In their viewing, that
– visual restlessness is subdued. Our attention is directed to those relations among
137 the images that fall out into ordered oppositional pairs, and that as a result tend
to be productive of meaning. To couch the phenomenon in the Freudian language

that we have been using for the Suite as a whole, we might describe those plates
as modeling the secondary processes, those that govern preconscious and conscious
thought. These, Freud argued, are characterized by a binding of energy and a re-
pression of the desire feuling it. The primary process, he wrote, “is directed to-
wards securing the free discharge of quantities of excitation, while the second system,
by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge
and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one.”68 Said differently, the job
of the secondary process is to limit the number of associative links established
among separate mental images and ideas, and thereby to stabilize the relation-
ships between them. As a pair of recent commentators on Freud have put it, “re-
pression takes place when energy is bound, and . . . the binding of energy is,
precisely, a denial of entry into the conscious mind, not merely to specific repre-
sentations, but perhaps above all to the multiple relations among representations
which characterize the primary process.”69
It is certainly a remarkable feature of the Vollard Suite that this “repression”
(this “denial of multiple relations among representations”) occurs within and
around a series of prints—the “Sculptor’s Studio”—whose subject itself con-
cerns the repression or sublimation of desire in the quiescent contemplation of
art. Yet it is also a feature worth remarking that the repression effected by the
“Studio” prints is never quite complete. Even when focused on that series, our
attention is in fact occasionally diverted to the images of bullfights or circus
performers—led astray, that is, by associations that are clearly beside the point.
The centrifugal pull of those associations is guaranteed by the very embeddedness
of the “Sculptor’s Studio” within the Suite at large, a condition that is difficult
to ignore in the actual handling and viewing of the prints. Consequently, and
somewhat ironically, it is with the “Studio” series that we are made most force-
fully aware of the destabilizing impulses encouraged by the Suite at large. It’s
there, too, that we are most clearly able to glimpse the implication of those im-
pulses. As a group, the plates of the “Sculptor’s Studio,” like the Rembrandt etch-
ing of The Artist and His Model out of which they were generated, effectively stage
repression; they allow us to see that the “classical” disinterest not only figured
in but actually encouraged by the series is achieved through the active and ongo-
ing denial of desire, and doesn’t merely arise in its absence. As a result, we are
made to see as well that, in contrast to the prevalent and securing image of “clas-
sical” art as unified and self-sufficient—the image that most often appears
within the “Sculptor’s Studio” itself—the Suite is a “classical” work that is both
decentered and decentering, that, in spite of its own repressions, repeatedly
catches its viewers up in something like the involuntary restlessness of desire.
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
4.2
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-
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

Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 95 (October 23, 1934).
4.5
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-

tures, of what he described as the primarily horizontal orientation of an animal’s
head with the insistent verticality of the Greek profile:
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
By contrast, the human face, particularly as presented in classical art, is struc-

tured, Hegel asserted, in such a way that “its soulful and spiritual relation to
things is manifested”:
[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
This head-to-head comparison appears as part of a larger argument in

which Hegel presents the classical sculptor’s turn from an archaic interest in an-
imal forms toward a repertoire devoted almost exclusively to human ones as a
quite literal elevation of the work’s spiritual content, keyed to the ascent of its
central axis. Bataille’s contrary aim in the “Mouth” essay, as we saw, was to over-
turn the verticality of the human anatomy and, in the process, the hierarchical
opposition from which Hegel had derived its meaning. But it was left to Picasso’s
blind Minotaur—albeit following Bataille’s lead—to raise the issue (or perhaps
we should say lower it) within a field once again proper to “classical” art and aes-
thetics.
Several other aspects of the “Blind Minotaur” series, and even the Suite at
large, also strongly evoke Bataille’s writings, especially those writings done in re-
sponse to Hegel. Recalling the associative, “metamorphic” relations among the
Vollard plates, we could point to the structure of Documents’ “Critical Dictionary”
itself—or, even better, to that of Bataille’s “Dossier hétérologie,” whose dense
interconnectedness but simultaneous refusal of unity or closure serves as both a
parody of the Hegelian Encyclopedia and an emblem for Bataille’s writing in gen-
eral.16 Then, too, much of the specific imagery used by Bataille touches on that
found in Picasso’s prints; the figure of the blind Minotaur is especially caught
up in the labyrinthine network of images that circulated throughout Bataille’s
writings of the late 1920s and 1930s. We’ve already encountered something of
Bataille’s preoccupation with the figure of the Minotaur. In his essay “Rotten
Sun,” both bulls and blindness are recurrent motifs—a coincidence that seems
all the more significant in that this piece was written as part of Documents’ special
“Hommage à Picasso.”17
Because of its aggregative structure, “Rotten Sun,” like most of Bataille’s
writings, resists paraphrase. And although it suffers, too, from selective extrac-
tion, it is perhaps nonetheless worth drawing out and pausing over those por-
tions most germane to the discussion at hand. The essay begins with Bataille’s
distinction between two different views of the sun or, as he puts it, between two
different suns: on the one hand, the sun is elevated and enlightening, as well as
being “the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at fixedly”; on the
other hand, the sun that is stared at is blinding, mutilative. “In the same way,”
Bataille writes, “that the preceding sun (the one not looked at) is perfectly beau-
tiful, the one that is scrutinized can be considered horribly ugly. In mythology,
the scrutinized sun is identified with a man who slays a bull (Mithra), with a vul-
ture that eats the liver (Prometheus).”18 Following a gruesome description of
Mithraic sacrifice, Bataille adds that its slain bull is also associated with the
150 blinding sun—as is, he later concludes, the art of Picasso.
– There are several things worth noticing here. One, which we earlier ges-
151 tured toward, is the way the individual elements of the essay are tied to one an-
other less by the aid of deductive or logical reasoning than through associations

perhaps best described as operating “laterally.” That is, rather than being in the
service of an argument that is developed and methodically carried through, im-
ages, anecdotes, and fragments of myth are linked to one another on the basis of
shared but seemingly tangential points of reference. In one of his earliest essays,
“The Solar Anus,” Bataille had in fact specifically addressed the possibility—if
not the inevitability—of composition by means of such “lateral” linkages, “be-
cause,” as he said, “with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another;
all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and
in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought through its own
labyrinth.”19 (Needless to say, that statement is both a commentary on the com-
plex network of associations to be found in Bataille’s writings, and itself very
much a part of that network.)
We should also notice how in “Rotten Sun”—and “The Solar Anus,” too,
for that matter—the “Ariadne’s thread” of associations repeatedly loops back on
itself, forming knots or nodal points around which the other images, as a result,
seem to congregate. Another way we might remark the same phenomenon would
be to say that those “nodal” images appear overdetermined by the elements sur-
rounding them.20 Later, the narrative thread of the present chapter will itself loop
back to pick up the discussion of overdetermination. In the meantime it is per-
haps sufficient, first, to point out that the figure of the blind Minotaur is
nowhere specifically mentioned in Bataille’s writings (including the essay on Pi-
casso), but that, because of its numerous connections to figures and images that
are, it in effect creates and comes to stand at another major node or crossing
within the Bataillean labyrinth of thought.21 Secondly, we should remind our-
selves that the blind Minotaur is equally bound up with the imagery of the Vol-
lard Suite. In fact, in addition to his multiple and complex relations to its various
other characters, he, like many of them, derives from one of Rembrandt’s etch-
ings. The blind Minotaur’s pose—with mouth agape, arms, legs, and cane fum-
bling forward—clearly mimics that of the main figure in Rembrandt’s Blindness
of Tobit (fig. 4.7).22 Having recognized this, we might say (and in such a way so
152
– 4.7
153 Rembrandt, The Blindness of Tobit, 1651.
as to emphasize its apparent redundancy) that the blind Minotaur is simulta-

neously overdetermined by the imagery of Bataille’s essays and by that—equally as-
sociative—of the Vollard Suite.
There remains a final way in which the “Blind Minotaur” series is entan-
gled in the Ariadne’s thread of Bataille’s writings: like them, it manifests a thor-
oughgoing concern with the act of sacrifice.23 Perhaps the most direct—if also the
most literally peripheral—indication of that concern is to be found in the small
Death of Marat that appears, canceled and inverted, on the left side of the first of
those Blind Minotaur plates (see figs. 4.3 and 4.8). The etching of Marat was ini-
tially produced some two months earlier, to accompany a book of verse by the
surrealist poet Benjamin Péret.24 Although little in its composition recalls any of
the particularities of the poems collected in that volume, the imagery of Marat
is broadly consistent with the character of Péret’s work, full as that work often
is of political invective and suggestions of sexual strife.25 Clearly Picasso’s own
desire to rethink classicism—or at least, in this case, the neoclassicism of
Jacques-Louis David—also figured in the choice of subject matter. But more
than either David or Péret, it is Bataille who is invoked by the subject’s actual
presentation. Marat’s murder is envisioned as a violent act of sacrifice, the bath-
tub of the Davidian composition having become an altar and Charlotte Corday’s
weapon a massive knife, now poised at the throat of Marat. Presiding over the en-
tire sacrificial scene is a soleil pourri, an orb that is simultaneously sun, eye, and
“solar anus.”26
In both its style and its subject matter, Picasso’s Death of Marat closely re-
sembles the contemporaneous work of André Masson. From 1932 to 1933, Mas-
son had done a whole series of pen-and-ink Massacres (fig. 4.9): drawing after
drawing in which one group of figures (exclusively male) slits the throats of an-
other (almost always female).27 Except for its reversal of gender roles and its art
historical reference, Picasso’s Marat would be perfectly at home in this world.
Masson, of course, was the artist most closely associated with Bataille, and the
one who had dedicated himself most completely to images of sacrifice.28 In
1934—the year of the Marat and the “Blind Minotaurs”—Masson embarked on
154
– 4.8
155 Picasso, The Death of Marat, 1934 (July 21).
4.9
Masson, Massacre, 1932.
a collaboration with Bataille that eventually culminated in an album entitled,

simply, Sacrifices.29 The volume contained an essay by Bataille and five of Masson’s
etchings depicting gods who had been sacrificed or slain: Mithra, Orpheus,
Osiris, “Le Crucifié” (a Christlike figure with a decidedly equine head), and, per-
haps most significant in the present context, the Minotaur (fig. 4.10).30
To the uninitiated, Masson’s fascination with sacrifice may seem at best ec-
centric. To Bataille, however, nothing could have been more innate to an artist.
In fact, the majority of Bataille’s essays for Documents were concerned precisely
with articulating what he felt to be the fundamental relationship between sacri-
156
– 4.10
157 Masson, The Minotaur, 1934.
fice and the visual arts. Before we can address that relationship, though—much

less its specific connection to Picasso—it is imperative that we understand a bit
about the powerful fascination that sacrifice held for Bataille. This, too, would
seem to have been a product of his colloquy with Hegel.
Already strong, that colloquy intensified in 1934 when Bataille began at-
tending the lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit given by Alexandre Kojève at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. One of the fundamental tenets of the Phenom-
enology as presented by Kojève was that human (Spiritual) being differentiates it-
self from animal being when its desires are directed no longer toward real,
“positive” objects, but toward the Desire of others. Kojève also emphasized that,
because animal desires are all essentially aimed at self-preservation, human being
comes to light only when life is willfully risked in the attainment of some other
end. Being human, then, necessarily entails exposing oneself to death.
Bataille likewise foregrounded this aspect of the Phenomenology in his 1955
essay “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,”31 which, though written after the period
with which we are concerned, nonetheless makes explicit much of what had long
been at stake for Bataille in the philosopher’s work. The essay, for example,
quotes at length and with the utmost admiration the following passage from
Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology:
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

the encounter between the future master and slave, each necessarily risks death
in the struggle for domination. What the dialectic fails to acknowledge (because
it cannot subsume) are those instances in which there really is loss of life, where
one or both parties are killed in the struggle. These irredeemable and therefore
meaningless deaths are at once crucial to the story Hegel is telling—without
them it would be evident that neither “master” nor “slave” has really risked any-
thing—and yet phenomenologically invisible.35 The entire system rests, in a
sense, on those inadmissible corpses. Through their exclusion, the dialectic is
able to give meaning to death, while simultaneously “blinding itself to the base-
lessness of the non-meaning from which the basis of meaning is drawn.”36
Bataille compares the operation of the dialectic and the sleight-of-hand it
employs to acts of sacrifice in which, at the last minute, an animal is substituted
for the would-be human victim. By means of this subterfuge, the sacrificer is able
to survive his own death in order to experience Spirit rising, phoenixlike, from
the ashes. Here it is perhaps worth quoting Bataille at some length:
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
With Derrida’s mention of a “blind spot” we may well be reminded of

Bataille’s own imagery of the two suns, articulated in his essay in homage to Pi-
casso. The first sun, it will be recalled, was enlightening, if “impossible to look
at fixedly,” and associated above all with “spiritual elevation.” The second sun, by
contrast—the “blinding,” “mutilative” one that clearly held the most fascination
for Bataille—was closely linked with mythology and an excessive, unproductive
expenditure of energy. The first, we might say, presides over the founding of the
Hegelian system; the second (but of course they are really the same sun) threat-
ens to undermine it from within.39
A few months after the appearance of “Rotten Sun” and the special “Hom-
160 mage à Picasso,” Bataille published “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear
– of Vincent Van Gogh.”40 Like the earlier essay, but now at greater length and in
161 more detail, this one interweaves many of the strands that we have just been
attempting to sort out: Bataille’s fascination with sacrifice, the imagery of the

blinding sun, and the connection of both to painting and the visual arts more
generally. For that reason alone, the text merits our relatively extended
consideration.
It opens with excerpts from a clinical report concerning a young painter, a
certain Gaston F., who, after staring into the sun, promptly bit off his finger. The
essay then proceeds to a discussion of Van Gogh, via Van Gogh’s obsession with
the sun and sunflowers, and his own comparable act of self-mutilation. The lat-
ter half of the essay describes various horrific sacrificial rituals—ones in which
there is no substituted animal victim—and dwells at some length on mytholog-
ical tales of the “sacrifice of a god.” Such tales had recently come to the atten-
tion of a number of ethnographers and mythologists,41 who discovered in them
a curious identification between the god and his supposed adversary. When stud-
ied in the context of the full mythological system, these antagonists—Bataille
refers specifically to Prometheus and the eagle (aetos prometheus)—are revealed to
be in fact different aspects of the same being. Thus, the essay, which had begun
by implying that automutilation was a perverse form of sacrifice, ends conversely
by suggesting that sacrifice has its mythological origin in automutilation.
The essay’s two halves—further differentiated in that the first deals ex-
clusively with painters, the second with a more diverse group of sacrificers and
automutilators—are joined together by the story of a young woman (not an
artist) who tears out her eyes. Despite the fact that it is accorded fairly brief
space, the woman’s story serves in a sense as the linchpin for the entire essay.
Everything turns on her blinding. What enables this act to play its pivotal role
within the structure of the text is that “Oedipean enucleation,” as Bataille refers
to it, not only is “the most horrifying form of sacrifice,” but it also, and more im-
portantly, inscribes sacrifice squarely within the field of vision.
In the previous issue of Documents, Bataille had likewise sought to draw a
connection between the visual arts and sacrificial self-mutilation, this time on
historical (or rather, prehistorical) grounds. The occasion was a review of G. H.
Luquet’s L’Art primitif (1930), a book that aimed to account for the origins and
development of art throughout the Paleolithic period.42 Luquet’s interpretation
of the Aurignacian cave paintings was modeled, it would seem, on the hunting ex-
peditions to which they presumably referred. When the primitive artist created
an image of a bison or reindeer on the wall of the cave, his desire, according to
Luquet, had been essentially that of the hunter: to possess the beast, to grasp its
form. Tracking his quarry over the centuries, prehistoric man had gradually
learned to perfect the image, until finally he had captured the animal, as it were,
exactly. Luquet compared this progress with the development of artistic skills in
children, which, he claimed, similarly proceeded from inchoate scribbling to rec-
ognized (and recognizable) form, the drawing becoming ever more accomplished
with each repetition. Bataille referred to Luquet’s scenario as the development of
art by progressive “appropriation”; and while he conceded that it held a certain
explanatory power, he believed that it was not the only possible account. In fact,
Bataille argued that “appropriation” failed to explain one of the most striking
features of the Aurignacian hunt scenes: the marked difference in their depiction
of men and animals. Whereas the animal forms were delicate, detailed, conveying
a wealth of information, the images of the hunters themselves were crude and de-
forming—in a way, much more bestial than those of the reindeer or bison. The
scenario that these figures suggested was of an art motivated not by a desire for
mastery and possession, but by an urge to degrade and destroy, an urge that—
because it was reserved for the images of man—might aptly be characterized as
automutilative.
Just as Luquet had sought evidence for his hypothesis in the example of
children’s art, Bataille turned there for confirmation of his own claims. The
child’s impulse to draw, Bataille reminded his readers, was often vented on walls
and other initially pristine surfaces. It was an impulse less recognizably aesthetic
than destructive: a drive to mar or deface. In contrast to Luquet’s account of pro-
gressive appropriation, Bataille asserted that much art “proceeds in this sense
162 through successive destructions.”43 And indeed, confronted with André Masson’s
– etchings or Picasso’s Death of Marat, we may well be tempted to agree. Such works
163 would seem to belong fully to the mutilative strain of art elaborated by Bataille.
For theirs are the styles of vandals: crude markings that appear to deface the very

figures that they constitute, and which, as a result, seem perfectly in keeping with
their chosen subject of human sacrifice.
Yet there is still a sense in which we might want to say that Picasso’s Death
of Marat, for all its seeming collusion with Bataille, remains an assiduously
Hegelian image. After all, in illustrating sacrifice, in turning it into a represen-
tation (however crude), doesn’t the etching essentially repeat the substitutive
“subterfuge” denounced by Bataille? Doesn’t it domesticate and thereby betray
sacrifice by making it into a purely vicarious experience? Perhaps it was just such
a recognition that led Picasso to cancel the image, by deeply gouging an “X”
across its surface. Art, as Bataille said, often “proceeds in this sense through suc-
cessive destructions.” In fact, in an interview conducted during the winter of
1934, when work on the “Blind Minotaur” series was still ongoing, Picasso him-
self used words remarkably similar to describe his artistic practice. “In the old
days,” he said, “a picture went forward to completion by stages. Every day
brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case,” he
claimed, virtually echoing Bataille, “a picture is a sum of destructions.”44
The Blind Minotaur that soon appeared on the plate alongside the canceled
Marat does indeed suggest an engagement with Bataillean notions of sacrifice
that is at once deeper and more subtle than its predecessor’s. Graphic depiction
has been replaced by suggestion (so that the plate seems less strictly illustrative),
while sacrifice of another has given way to apparent automutilation. In the com-
pany of his youthful female companion, the blind Minotaur in fact stirs associ-
ations with specifically “Oedipean” enucleation—in Bataille’s words, “that most
horrifying form of sacrifice.”45
Nonetheless, we may object, isn’t it yet the case that at least that first Blind
Minotaur—positioned as it is alongside the canceled and inverted Marat—per-
fectly illustrates (if now in a slightly different sense) a Hegelian view of history
and change? Doesn’t the plate’s peculiar pairing of images exactly correspond to
the movement of the Aufhebung—the negation that simultaneously preserves
what it cancels, and that thereby drives the Hegelian dialectic? Shouldn’t we,
then, view the “Blind Minotaur” series as the transcendent outcome of the
dialectic’s smooth operation: the Truth revealed through its determinate
negations?
Such a conclusion would be incontrovertible were it not for the fact that
in other, more significant ways the “Blind Minotaur” prints explicitly disturb
and undermine the ordered functioning of the dialectic. Crucial in this regard is
the images’ embeddedness within the Vollard Suite and, consequently, their rela-
tion to its other plates. In particular, the blind Minotaur needs to be seen along-
side his sighted counterpart. For that Minotaur, as we discovered at the beginning
of this chapter, really did appear to be the product of dialectical reconciliation:
the sublation of the opposition between vision and touch as those were staked
out by, respectively, the classical sculptor and his alter ego from the “Battle of
Love.” As such, the sighted Minotaur was the very embodiment of what Bataille
had referred to as an aesthetic of “appropriation”; his gaze seemed capable of em-
bracing everything within its scope. By contrast, the blind Minotaur, although
still occupying a position in relation to the terms of opticality and physicality,
effectively dislodges them from the grip of the dialectic. Following Derrida, we
might say that the Minotaur’s blinding constitutes so irreversible a sacrifice, so
radical a negativity, that it can no longer be identified as negativity in a process
or system. It is instead that which undermines the system from within. To phrase
things somewhat differently: the Minotaur’s enucleation reveals the “blind spot”
of the system proposed by the “Sculptors Studio” series; the point at which Pi-
casso’s fantasy of carnal vision passes over into mere carne. In this regard the
“Blind Minotaur” series differs from such illustrations of sacrifice as Masson’s
etchings (even the most ostensibly Bataillean) or Picasso’s own Death of Marat. It
involves foremost a sacrifice of meaning. Strictly speaking, the Minotaur’s de-
picted blindness is only a consequence of the “automutilation” of sense, sense
that had been generated out of the Suite’s structural relations. This, we might say,
164 is what makes the “Blind Minotaur” series less an illustration of sacrifice than its
– performance or enactment. It is also what makes its Minotaur—much more than
165 Masson’s—the equivalent of the “sacrificed god” of mythology.
4.11
Picasso, The Minotauromachy (fifth state), 1935.
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
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

of the blind Minotaur’s companions. In prints pulled from early states of the
Minotauromachy (fig. 4.15), before the relevant area was darkened by hatching, in-
dividual ears of grain are plainly visible.49
With their birds, and through their own resemblance to the blind Mino-
taur’s guide, the two women in the upper left-hand corner of the print are like-
wise implicated in the imagery of sacrifice. In fact the birds themselves are
implicated twice over; positioned as they are alongside the Christlike figure, they
allude not only to pagan sacrificial victims but also to the Holy Spirit.50 The
doves’ pairing encourages our recognition of this doubleness—and of the fact
that they thus represent two separate and even diametrically opposed aspects of
sacrifice. On the one hand they refer to the animal put to death, on the other to
that element which, in surviving death, emerges from the sacrifice as pure, as-
cendant Spirit.
In view of the considerable overlap in subject and significance we witnessed
earlier between Masson’s Massacres and Picasso’s Death of Marat, it might be inter-
esting to reintroduce Masson’s Le Crucifié here (fig. 4.16). The main figure in
Masson’s etching, animal-headed and chin upturned, plainly recalls Picasso’s
blind Minotaur, as well as the inverted facial hierarchies about which Bataille had
written. Just as strongly, though, the print’s crucified figure stirs associations
with the third- and fourth-century reliefs of quasi-bestial gods that illustrated
Bataille’s 1930 essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” In light of the close
collaboration between Bataille and Masson—and still with an eye toward dis-
cerning the Bataillean connotations of the Minotauromachy’s own Christlike fig-
ure—a short discussion of that essay and its illustrations may prove to be
illuminating. (As always, we must be prepared for the possibility that it will be a
blinding illumination, like “the horror emanating from a brilliant arc lamp.”)
The Gnostic gods were of interest to Bataille because they represented, as
he said, “a bizarre but mortal subversion of the ideal and the order expressed to-
day by the words ‘classical antiquity’.” The essay gives us to understand that
Bataille has in mind not simply an aesthetic ideal and order (although certainly
that), but also a religious and philosophical one. Describing Gnosticism as “a
kind of superior Christianity elaborated by philosophers who had broken with
Hellenistic speculation,” Bataille suggests that its strangeness, its radical other-
ness, has the potential to undermine the seeming self-evidence and hegemony of
more modern systems of thought. Once again, it is Hegel who epitomizes the
latter for Bataille:
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
– As Bataille goes on to imply in the footnote that follows, seeing Hegelian-

171 ism in this way, as historically descended from Gnosticism, has the effect of mak-
Masson, Le Crucifié, 1934.

4.16
ing it appear drastically reductive. By focusing its considerable energies on over-
coming dualism, on reconciling contradiction, the dialectic aims—and this is
perhaps the real point of the essay—toward a monism on par with (and to a large
extent modeled after) Christian theology. We might ourselves underline that
point by noting, as others have, the compelling structural similarity between the
Holy Trinity and the Hegelian dialectic, with its thesis, antithesis, and ultimate
synthesis. The similarity takes on an even greater force and significance if we res-
urrect at the same time Bataille’s comparison of the dialectic to a sanitized form
of sacrifice. In view of that comparison, the Crucifixion seems virtually paradig-
matic of the “sacrificial subterfuge” of which Hegelianism stood accused; for al-
though it undeniably involves the death of a human being, that death is
completely recouped by Christianity as Spirit and for meaning.
Masson’s repulsive, vaguely Gnostic deity brings all of this, as it were, to a
head. The move is strategic: meant to undercut the orthodox, idealizing inter-
pretations of the Crucifixion by monstrously emphasizing the dualistic nature
of “Le Crucifié” and thereby forestalling any assumed transubstantiation of base
matter into Spirit. Picasso’s tack is somewhat different. Avoiding literal depic-
tions of sacrificial crucifixion, it relies to a greater degree on associations be-
tween and among figures, and, partly as a consequence of that, on the viewer’s
interpretive process. As with the Blind Minotaur, the result is a print that doesn’t
so much illustrate sacrifice (the way Masson’s does) as put sacrifice into practice.
That claim may be more fully persuasive if we understand a bit more about
the nature of sacrifice and why it exercised such a powerful hold on the imagina-
tions of Bataille and his group. In large measure, it seems to have been due to the
perfect ambivalence of sacrificial rituals, an ambivalence that is registered in the
word “sacrifice” itself. The Latin root, sacer, was, as Bataille once noted, one of the
“primal” words, studied by Freud, that contained two absolutely antithetical
meanings.52 It signified both the holy and the damned. Over the centuries, of
172 course, the word “sacred” and its cognates lost their originally dual sense. Just as
– Western religions, by relegating sacrifice to merely symbolic activities, had re-
173 pressed what Bataille referred to as the “left” (or sinister) sacred, so Western
logic had contrived to eliminate the ambivalent duality of words, to construct a

system of language and thought in which each term would be assigned a specific
and singular value. The project Bataille set for himself (a project that was for-
malized in 1937 when he, along with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, founded
the Collège de Sociologie) was twofold: to reintroduce the sinister sacred into
contemporary society, and to create some experience of the ambivalent, an expe-
rience that might be capable of unraveling the neat binary oppositions of logical,
Hegelian thought. Both aims, it was felt, could be accomplished through violent
rituals of sacrifice and automutilation.
The group’s understanding of sacrificial practice was primarily based, as we
earlier remarked, on the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss,53 particularly
his study in collaboration with Henri Hubert, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sa-
crifice (1898). Prior to the publication of this study, most of the literature on the
subject had been devoted to the description and classification of sacrificial ritu-
als. Each of the various forms of sacrifice, performed on whatever occasion and
to whatever end, had been generally assigned to one of two groups: it was either
a sacrifice of communion or one of expiation. Yet these two groups were thought
to be of unequal importance. A number of studies (foremost among them those
by the English anthropologist William Robertson Smith)54 had suggested that
redenção expiatory sacrifices were merely derivations of communion rituals, and that all
sacrifice was at base, then, a matter of communing or joining with a potentially
beneficent god. Mauss and Hubert disagreed. They argued that expiation was
every bit as fundamental and irreducible as communion, but that the two were
still not entirely separable forms of sacrifice. Summarizing their observations of
ancient Hebrew practices, they noted that
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
According to Mauss and Hubert, the fundamental ambiguity of sacrifice—

which is to say, its thoroughgoing engagement with the sacred—was increasingly
concentrated over the course of the ritual in the figure of the victim: “The victim
represents death as well as life, illness as well as health, sin as well as virtue, fal-
sity as well as truth.”56 In addition, as Mauss and Hubert repeatedly emphasized,
the victim represents the sacrifier (“the subject to whom the benefits of sacrific-
ing thus accrue”);57 without that fundamental identification, there simply is no
sacrifice. This fact goes far toward explaining the authors’ deep interest in myths
of the death of a god, and their insistence that those myths revealed the purest
form of sacrifice. “This time,” they write, “all intermediaries have disappeared.
The god, who is at the same time the sacrifier, is one with the victim. . . . All the
differing elements which enter into ordinary sacrifice here enter into each other
and become mixed together.”58
The inherent ambiguity of sacrifice—at its most intense with the sacrificed
god—has its equivalent in a number of the Minotauromachy’s characters, includ-
ing, appropriately enough, its “sacrificial” Christ. The nearby doves, each look-
ing in that direction, each representing simultaneously divine Spirit and mere
animal victim, do much to assert the figure’s intrinsic ambivalence. At an even
more fundamental level, the Minotauromachy’s “Christ” figure itself embodies the
contradiction characteristic of sacrifice. We have already seen that Picasso freely
availed himself of Rembrandt’s etchings in the making of the Vollard Suite. It
should come as little surprise, then, that the Minotauromachy’s Christ, too, derives
from a print by Rembrandt—specifically, the large Descent from the Cross of 1633
(fig. 4.17).59 What is surprising to discover is that the figure has two separate
“sources” within that one print: both the long-necked, bearded Christ and the
174 man on the ladder, traditionally identified as an image of Rembrandt himself, ap-
– pearing fully guilt-ridden and stooped with shame. Picasso’s conflation of the
175 pair in the Minotauromachy yields a figure that is truly sacred, representing at once
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”

or “twisted.”
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
Slightly later Leiris elaborates:
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
It is thus at the instant before death, with the ever-so-fleeting identification of

bull and torero, sinister and dexter, that the event is at its most fully sacred.
Picasso’s coupling in the Minotauromachy of the imagery of sacrifice with
that of the bullfight reveals a remarkably similar conception and concern. The
print, too, sets up a structured confrontation between opposing elements; we are
encouraged to view its Minotaur, horse, and torera in terms of the traditional an-
tagonisms of the bullfight (the Minotaur, of course, being assimilated to the role
of the bull). Both the torera and horse appear, then, as adversaries—or, more ac-
curately, as victims—of the Minotaur. Indeed we are even encouraged to view the
horse and torera as a single composite figure (horse/woman, in contrast to
bull/man), a view that has the effect of drawing the oppositions all the more
sharply. And yet the torera’s sword disrupts that neat binarity. Whether we see it
as poised to deliver the coup de grâce to the horse, or as directed at the torera her-
self in a gesture of automutilation, the sword, in effect, divides the “figure”
against itself, transgressing the very opposition that would seem to endow it with
all of its significance and value. The torera’s sword might thus be said to mark
these figures with the “beauty” of the bullfight—a beauty that, according to
Leiris, is “comprised not simply by the joining of opposing elements, but by
their very antagonism, by the altogether active way that one tends to erupt in the
other, making its mark like a wound, like devastation.”65
The figure of the Minotaur reveals himself, on close inspection, to be much
the same. Not only does he, in himself, embody the corrida’s antagonism between
man and bull, he also carries slung over his shoulder the cape of a torero. In the
two colored proofs that were made of the etching (see frontispiece), the identi-
fication is unmistakable: the bright red cape stands out dramatically from the
darker earth tones of the rest of the composition. Thus the Minotaur, too, is a
figure self-divided, self-different—like the sacrificed god of mythology.
Much as was said of the “Blind Minotaur” prints, this would yet be but a
representation of sacrifice (although an extremely subtle and complex one) were it
not for the fact that, on another level, the print seems to offer something much
closer to the experience of auto-annihilation, what Bataille referred to as “the ec-
static loss of one’s self.” The experience—or better, the self—in question is, in
the first instance, Picasso’s, though the implications for us, in our own encounter
with the print, are scarcely less dire. In any case, before the issue can be addressed
at all, we need to pick up the threads of two issues abandoned earlier: the rela-
178 tion of the Minotauromachy’s imagery to that of the Vollard Suite, and the question
– of overdetermination. Although the two are closely related, we might as well at
179 least begin by addressing them in turn.
Upon the Minotauromachy’s introduction to our discussion, we noted that

the print was like the Vollard Suite (and, of course, especially the “Blind Minotaur”
plates) in at least one quite obvious regard: in each, the figure of the Minotaur
looms large. In fact, the very pose of the blind Minotaur—facing left, with that
outsized arm stretched before him (see particularly fig. 4.3)—is repeated almost
exactly by the Minotaur of the Minotauromachy. Thrust into this new context, the
extended arm no longer functions as a gesture of the Minotaur’s blindness. Yet
its meaning here is not so very different, either: held out as if to block the illu-
mination of the candle, that arm at least signals a desire not to see. In that sense, it
signals, too, the same rejection of vision-as-appropriation incarnated by the
blind Minotaur.
Just as remarkably, the origin of the candle can also be traced to the Vollard
Suite, specifically, to plate 26 (fig. 3.7). Indeed, the entire triangular grouping of
onlooker, candle, and recumbent female that formed the basis of that plate’s
composition returns, just left of center, in the composition of the Minotauromachy.
No sooner have we noted the unlikely reappearance of this group, however, than
we become aware of the fundamental changes that have been wrought. The vigi-
lant youth has been transformed into a young girl—and a girl, moreover, who is
clearly related to the blind Minotaur’s guide. (There are distinct “family resem-
blances” among the three figures.) Similarly, the Minotauromachy’s recumbent fe-
male owes as much to the toreras of the Vollard Suite (see, e.g., fig. 3.8) as she does
to the somnolent nude of plate 26. She is, in effect, an amalgamation of those
characters, a composite, analogous to the “collective figures” produced by the
mechanism of condensation in dreams.
In fact, the terminology of the dreamwork is particularly well suited to de-
scribing the Minotauromachy’s entire central group. We can see the plates of the
Vollard Suite on analogy with the latent content, or “dream thoughts,” the later
etching with the dream itself. As Freud repeatedly emphasized, the relationship
between these two is not one of direct correspondence—not one, that is, in
which each element of the dream represents (or is determined by) a particular
dream thought. Things are more complicated than that. Not only can a single
dream thought be manifested in several elements of the dream but, perhaps even
more significantly, a single element of the dream can have been motivated by sev-
eral separate dream thoughts; this is what Freud meant when he referred to the
overdeterminedness of dream imagery.66 As we have seen, the imagery of the
Minotauromachy is related to the Vollard Suite in much the same manner: each of its
principal figures can be traced to at least two separate Vollard plates and, con-
versely, each of those plates appears to have inspired at least two separate figures
of the Minotauromachy. The result is a complicated, subterranean network of asso-
ciations that, even more than the print’s dense cross hatching, binds its central
group inextricably together.
For example, the young girl is linked to the Minotaur via their common
origin in the “Blind Minotaur” series, at the same time that she is bound to the
torera by the resemblance they share to the sleepwatcher and sleeper of plate 26.
The torera, through her reference to the Suite’s scenes of the bullfight, is of course
also closely associated with the bull-headed Minotaur (who in turn is independ-
ently linked to the young girl, and so on). Finally, the Minotaur’s outstretched
arm draws these tangled relationships into a kind of Gordian knot. Held out be-
fore him as it had been throughout the “Blind Minotaur” series, that arm now
reaches straight for the candle, uncannily positioned just there as a result of its ori-
gin in the triangular configuration of plate 26. In consequence of that gesture,
and that coincidence, the whole group of figures acquires a strong sense of the
inevitable. We get the impression that each element is absolutely necessary ex-
actly as it is—that, had any figure been represented in any other way, the group
would not possess the same astonishing coherence.
In what is almost certainly a parallel instance of overdetermination, at pre-
cisely this time, in 1935, Roger Caillois, a friend of Bataille and the other dissi-
dent surrealists, was concluding a study on “automatic thinking” whose main
points bear directly on the interwoven imagery of the Minotauromachy.67 Caillois
180 had become convinced that “waking thoughts, left to their own necessity”—
– which is to say, left unconstrained by the demands of narrative or logic—“would
181 act exactly like condensed dream images, so that the automatic association of
ideas would function according to the same mechanism of overdetermination as

the elaborative activity of dreams.”68 To test the hypothesis, Caillois conducted
a kind of experiment in which, after lulling his mind into a state of relaxation,
he quickly jotted down the ideas that crossed the threshold of his awareness. An-
alyzing the list subsequently, Caillois noted that its items were not linked by a
simple chain of associations (the first idea motivating the second, the second in
turn suggesting the third). Rather, the entire list seemed thoroughly overdeter-
mined, each item evidently having made its appearance by virtue of the variety,
strength, and number of its connections to the others.69 Far from being arbitrary,
then, a purely chance association of ideas, the list possessed a certain necessity,
each item seeming—at least in retrospect—to be required for the coherence of
the whole. Hence the significance of the study’s title, La Nécessité d’esprit. It em-
phasizes both the rigorous interdependence of the thoughts produced through
the process of automatic thinking, and the complete autonomy of that process
with respect to any will or intention.
There were, Caillois realized, several closely related items on his list that
nonetheless appeared more important—because more overdetermined—than
the others. In fact, beyond even its demonstration that the mechanism of overde-
termination guided automatic thinking, what struck Caillois most about the ex-
periment was that it indicated the existence of certain objects and ideas whose
exceptional compellingness seemed to derive not merely from the associations
they conjured but also, and more crucially, from those associations’ own dense
interrelatedness. Caillois dubbed such objects and ideas “lyrical ideograms,” and
(despite what may seem the oddly romantic or sentimental connotations of that
term) he insisted that their effect was not to be considered purely, or even pri-
marily, subjective. The tightly woven web of associations surrounding each
ideogram had, he emphasized, developed over time and through a myriad of cul-
tural, linguistic, and even, in some cases, biological relations, to the point that it
could claim to be “an essential part of the element in question and consequently
to have as much claim as that element to objectivity.”70
Dramatizing the point, Caillois proceeded to analyze the ideogrammatic
qualities (in essence, the overdeterminedness) of an “element”—the praying
mantis—drawn from the natural world itself. Texts on entomology, anthro-
pology, psychoanalysis, philology, ancient myth, even works of fiction were
marshaled for the cause. Caillois discovered in this trove of mantis-related
information a remarkable recurrence of certain interconnected themes. The in-
sect appeared, for example, on an ancient coin from Metaponte that also depicted
an ear of corn and that therefore was thought to refer to Demeter and the
Eleusinian mysteries. One of the early names, empousa, for the genus under which
the mantis was classified was also the name, in ancient Greece, for a specter as-
sociated with the goddess Hecate. As Caillois points out, the earliest recorded
reference to that goddess is in a Homeric hymn to Demeter composed precisely
for the mysteries of Eleusis. Moreover, Hecate very early became identified as the
goddess of sorcerers and necromancers—the root of the latter word being the
same, of course, as the root of “mantis” itself.
And that’s only the beginning. To the African Bushmen the mantis was a
god, associated with the moon and, like Demeter, agriculture and the procure-
ment of food; in their mythology the mantis also possessed a tooth, in which all
of its power resided. Lunar and dental associations recur—improbably, it would
seem—in French lore about the insect. For instance, in Provence the mantis’s
nest was once widely regarded as the best remedy for toothaches, particularly if
it could be collected during the full moon. Noting this repeated association of
the mantis with teeth, Caillois adds that many popular guides to dream imagery
anos 30 - vagina dentata
assert that a tooth, and especially the pulling of a tooth, symbolizes castration.
Along the same lines, Caillois also remarks that it has become nearly a common-
place of psychoanalysis that “most castration complexes . . . originate in a terror
of a toothed vagina.”71 Inevitably this observation evokes one of the more mem-
orable facts about the mantis: that the female of the species decapitates the male
182 before copulation, and devours him entirely afterward.
– Caillois continues in this vein for page after page, listing information
183 about the mantis culled from the most heterogeneous of spheres and pointing
out, where not obvious, the connections that might be drawn. To anyone skepti-

cal of the project—who views its overdeterminations either as so extraordinary
as to be unique to the case at hand, or as simply the products of a mind having
lost all touch with reality—Caillois counters that there is in fact nothing par-
ticularly unusual about his demonstration. When one considers the sheer num-
ber of possible associations (the myriad things that might conceivably be said
about a praying mantis), and when one factors in, additionally, first the great
multiplicity of associations that could be made among the elements of that ini-
tial set via intermediaries, and then the mind’s evidently enormous capacity to
produce such associations, it becomes apparent, Caillois claims, that “overdeter-
minations, like coincidences, are not only normal, but unavoidable.”72
The acknowledged pervasiveness of overdetermination does nothing, how-
ever, in Caillois’s eyes, to blunt its effect. Far from it, that pervasiveness seems to
lend the ideogram a sense of inevitability that instead enhances its power, at least
for anyone caught in its grip. By way of example we can turn to Caillois’s own
youthful encounter with the praying mantis, an event whose circumstances are
also detailed in La Nécessité d’esprit. Although Caillois had been intrigued by the
mantis—and, no doubt, especially by its mating habits—for a number of years,
he had not actually seen one of the insects until a summer afternoon when, as a
teenager, he was vacationing with his family in Royan. On that very same day two
other events occurred that seemed to so overdetermine his discovery of the man-
tis that, years later, he still could not help thinking of them as “a disconcertingly
coherent whole.”73 The first event also involved the capture of an insect, this time
one with which he was not previously familiar: the death’s-head moth. (Coming
across it as he did, on a dark street next to the cemetery, its skull-like markings
plainly visible, undoubtedly heightened for him its deathly connotations.) The
second event was no less alarming and subsequently appeared no less related to
the finding of the mantis; for the first time in his life, Caillois was approached
by a prostitute, a woman “dressed in a green coat [manteau], as green as the pray-
ing mantis [mante].” Seized by a sudden fear far out of scale with anything de-
manded by the immediate situation, Caillois recoiled. It was only much later,
after recognizing the multiple connections among these causally unrelated
events, that he began to understand the intensity of his response, and the great
effect the day’s events had had on his subsequent emotional development.
Caillois would refer to the praying mantis and other such “manifestations
of overdetermination in the material world” as objective ideograms. The phrase
clearly seems designed to both recall and supplant the “objective chance” beloved
by the Bretonian wing of the surrealist movement. In La Nécessité d’esprit Caillois
in fact included (along with his response) the two-question survey sent out by
Breton and Paul Eluard that launched their objective-chance-oriented investiga-
tions: “What do you consider the essential encounter of your life? To what ex-
tent did this encounter seem, and does it seem to you now, to be fortuitous or
foreordained?”74 When Breton himself republished the survey, in L’Amour fou, he
defined objective-chance encounters as rare moments in which “an exterior ne-
cessity opens a path in the human unconscious.”75 They are moments, that is,
marked by the spontaneous appearance in the outside world of an object that an-
swers to, even as it reveals, one’s innermost desires.76 If Breton, looking back on
surrealism from the vantage point of 1952, regarded objective chance as “the
problem of problems,”77 this was perhaps because it encapsulated so well many
of his aspirations for the movement as a whole. Through its sheer unexpected-
ness, Breton believed, objective chance could breach the barriers separating the
unconscious from consciousness, inner life from outside world, thereby holding
out the possibility of their ultimate reconciliation. “Freud is Hegelian in me,”
Breton once remarked,78 confirming what is already evident from this discussion
of objective chance: that he hoped, through surrealism, to effect a dialectical reso-
lution of the self’s current state of dividedness and alienation. Instances of
chance were to be important catalysts toward this end. Encountering its (hereto-
fore repressed) desire in the exteriority and otherness of the found object, the
self, Breton reasoned, would become fully conscious of its own activity and so
184 able to return to itself, newly whole.
– In his response to the Breton-Eluard survey, and throughout La Nécessité
185 d’esprit, Caillois attempted to make clear his objections to the concept of objec-
tive chance. First, he denied the very existence of what was normally understood

by the word “chance.” Apparently fortuitous occurrences were, to his mind, not
only predetermined (or “foreordained,” to use Breton’s terminology), they were
overdetermined by events. And it was precisely those encounters that were the
most overdetermined—like Caillois’s own with the praying mantis—that would
come to seem the most affecting and therefore “essential” of one’s life.
Second, Caillois assiduously avoided reference to the “unconscious,” de-
spite his use of Freudian language elsewhere and his occasional remarks about
“consciousness” or “the conscious mind.” In place of the term he spoke only of
an “imaginative faculty.” It seems that, for Caillois, the unconscious (like
chance) was a nonexistent entity—and repression nothing more than the failure
to recognize the multiple overdeterminations of our thought.
Caillois differed from Breton, too, in his relation to the dialectic, and in
his generally greater willingness to engage Hegel as a participant in an active, on-
going conversation.79 It seems likely, even, that the title of La Nécessité d’esprit was
deliberately chosen to echo La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, as Hegel’s text was trans-
lated into French. Certainly there are numerous parallels, as well as points of
overt contrast, between the two works. Hegel and Caillois each assert, for ex-
ample, that there is a direct continuity between the mind and the world at large, of
which it is an integral part. The structure of thought, in other words, is held by
both men to be perfectly homologous with that of the world, and in that sense
thoroughly objective. Where Hegel and Caillois part company, however, is in
their vision of that structure. In Hegel’s mind it has the tripartite shape of the
dialectic; and his project is to reveal how all of human history (everything that
is or ever was) has developed, logically and systematically, through a chain of the-
ses, antitheses, and eventual syntheses. Against what might be called the deter-
minism of Hegelian thought, Caillois juxtaposes the overdeterminism of the
imagination and the world. For Caillois, too, knowledge is a matter of under-
standing the place of everything within an overarching structure; but, in his view,
that structure is a dense, weblike network, organized (to the extent that it is)
around certain particularly overdetermined “nodal points.” The logical relation-
ships that organize the dialectic are but one of the many kinds of associations
produced by Caillois’s automatic thinking. We might say, as a result, that Hegel’s
rational antitheses comprise only a “restricted economy” operating within the
larger, more general one of the “imagination.”80 It is surely not the least of the
ideogram’s fascinations for Caillois that it has the ability to bring this situation
to light, to reveal the unlimiting boundaries of non-sense inside of which the
economy of reason is inscribed.
Armed with this understanding of the ideogram, we are perhaps ready to
return to the Minotauromachy and its distinctly overdetermined figures. The
print’s torera in particular seems to lend herself to consideration in this regard.
If, like Caillois during the conduct of his experiment, we lull our minds into a
state conducive to free association, her ideogrammatic qualities soon become ap-
parent. We realize that the figure not only draws on multiple characters appear-
ing within the Vollard Suite, but is equally overdetermined by a host of other
images scattered throughout the history of art. Her pose, for instance, especially
in combination with that rearing horse, readily brings to mind the ecstatic
equestrienne of Goya’s Los proverbios (fig. 4.18). (If we transpose left and right,
thereby undoing the reversal achieved in the Minotauromachy’s printing, the sim-
ilarity becomes even more evident.) At the same time, however, the torera also
recalls the main figure from Titian’s Rape of Europa (fig. 4.19). Already in the
bullfight scenes of the Vollard Suite, the pose of the torera—slung, belly up, over
the back of a bull—conjured strong associations with Europa’s image. In the
Minotauromachy, the woman’s bared breasts and raised right arm evoke Titian’s fig-
ure even more overtly, so that, despite the substitution of the (Goyaesque) horse
4.18
Goya, Los proverbios, no. 10, published 1864.
186
– 4.19
187 Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–1562.
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-
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

print necessarily incites a deep methodological crisis. Iconographic analysis
proves to be of only limited use, and the usual standards of artistic intent sud-
denly seem irrelevant.87 No doubt Picasso experienced this “intentional” crisis
as acutely as anyone, indeed even more so. He must have felt himself to be merely
a passive observer before what could only have been—how else to explain it?—
the imagery’s more or less automatic production. If Caillois’s descriptions of his
own similar “productions” are any guide, the sensation was less of drawing asso-
ciations than of being drawn by them, less of having thoughts than of simply be-
ing the vehicle through which thoughts are had. In La Nécessité d’esprit Caillois
compared the experience with the paranoid condition that at the time was known
as psychasthenia. He recalled having observed several patients suffering from the
condition. “I am not living,” one woman had reported, “but someone is living me;
when I sleep, someone sleeps me.” Caillois enthusiastically adopted her language
to describe his own obsession at the time with automatic thinking: “What I
wanted to do more than anything was to break the interdependence of my body
and my thought. I wanted to cross the border of my skin, live on the other side
of my senses; I practiced watching myself from a given point in space.”88
Later, in Le Mythe et l’homme, this comparison of psychasthenia and overde-
termination was brought to bear on Caillois’s discussion of myth. Also included
in the book, along with an expanded version of his study on the praying man-
tis, was an excursus on instinctual mimicry in insects.89 The latter’s seemingly
eccentric presence in the book Caillois justified through an appeal to Bergson’s
assertion that “mythological representations are intended to provoke, in the ab-
sence of instinct, the behavior that that instinct would have set in motion.”90 The
instinctual mimicry of insects, Caillois argued—from the camouflaging of the
mantis itself as a stem or long blade of grass, to certain butterflies’ simulation
of leaves—was not, as had always been assumed, a defensive measure. Studies
had shown that predators were rarely fooled by such homomorphy, and that even
inedible insects, which had no need for defensive measures, often employed it.
Caillois attributed mimicry instead to “an overwhelming desire to imitate,” and
specifically to imitate space, the surrounding world. Far from aiding the preserva-
tion of the organism (as is the case with most animal instincts), mimicry, he as-
serted, actually affects its dissolution and dispersal.91 And the same holds true,
he felt, of myth, with its multiple overdeterminations. Like the claims of the psy-
chasthenic, both myth and mimicry testify, Caillois believed, to a crisis in iden-
tity, an inability to distinguish between self and other, I and not-I.
Here we may well recall that in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the acquisition of
self-consciousness, and so the differentiation of self from other, was addressed
through the dialectic of the master and slave. Necessary for that stage of spiri-
tual development was that the adversaries risk death—but only up to a point.
Precisely to the point, that is, where death acquires meaning before sliding over
into sheer meaninglessness. Derrida (paraphrasing Bataille) describes the me-
chanics of the master/slave dialectic as follows:
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-

sche’s definition of myth as an utterance that performs an “orgiastische
Selbstvernichtung”—a phrase that might well be translated by Bataille’s
“self-annihilation” or, better still, his “ecstatic loss of one’s self.”94 If Mauss and
Hubert asserted that it was in the myths of the dying god that the nature of sac-
rifice was most purely expressed, Le Mythe et l’homme seems to suggest, conversely,
that it is in those same tales of sacrificial self-annihilation that myth finds its most
characteristic subject matter. The associative delirium provoked by myth’s
overdetermination allows the self to exist only, to use Hegel’s phrase, in utter
dismemberment.
Explaining his own attraction to myth, and his periodic recourse in writ-
ing to a quasi-mythological mode, Bataille drew attention to the vigilance with
which logic guards its self-preserving boundaries. “The exclusion of mythology
by reason,” he wrote, “is necessarily a rigorous one, on which there is no going
back. . . . But at the same time,” he continued, now explaining the strategic aspect
of his mythologizing, “it is necessary to overturn the values created by means of
this exclusion; in other words, the fact that reason denies any valid content in a mytholog-
ical series is the condition of its most significant value.”95 We might add that it is perhaps,
by the same token, the condition of the Minotauromachy’s most significant value,
the circumstance that gives its “mythological” overdeterminedness and “sacrifi-
cial” ambiguity a certain strategic import.
The fact of reason’s denial of myth is also what makes the print’s evoca-
tions of the myth of the Minotaur so extraordinarily apt. We noted near the be-
ginning of this chapter that, historically, the Minotaur’s death has been read as
in effect the foundation myth of logical thought. Theseus’s slaying of the mon-
ster amid the dark, disorienting spaces of the Cretan labyrinth, and his subse-
quent escape to the other side of its walls, is often taken to prefigure the triumph
of logic and metaphysics—the philosophy that was born, like the vanquishing
Theseus himself, under the clear blue skies of Athens. The Minotaur’s death
appears in this light as Derrida’s “obligatory stage in the history of self-
consciousness and phenomenality, that is to say, in the presentation of meaning.”
Alongside this view of the myth, however, we might juxtapose Picasso’s
own encounter with the Minotaur, an encounter that (as we also noted near the
beginning of the chapter) was thoroughly overdetermined—by the artist’s rela-
tionships with Leiris and Bataille, his previous collaboration with Skira on Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, his love of Goya and the bullfights, and no doubt a host of other
associations (related to these) that we have yet to discover. It is as if the Mino-
taur lay in wait for Picasso, suddenly appearing at every turn. The artist must
have felt at the time much like the sacrificial victims of the myth: trapped in a
labyrinth of images, driven down associative paths plainly not of his own mak-
ing, risking simultaneously the loss of both self and meaning.
There is, it should be obvious by now, a great irony in the fact that autobi-
ographical interpretations have become standard for the Minotauromachy, since the
print attests above all to a profound loss of self. On reflection, it might be more
accurate to say (with Bataille) that there is a great comedy in the situation, given
that those autobiographical interpretations essentially repeat the “sacrificial sub-
terfuge” that Bataille saw at work in Hegel. Faced with an image that attests to
the virtual disintegration of self-consciousness and that threatens the absolute
loss of meaning, art historians have tended to respond as “preservationists,” lo-
cating the truth of the work, narrowly, in the life of the artist. Hence we read
repeatedly that the figure of the Minotaur is Picasso, the other characters im-
portant people in his life. If, under the circumstances, it seems right to refuse
such easy equations, we might nonetheless concede that the bull-headed monster
is an apt figure for Picasso’s experience—the experience, that is, of being helpless
before one’s own irrational, alien, and overpowering “imagination.”
194
–
195
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,
the classical prints in the context of picasso’s oeuvre

etching is characterized by a decenteredness and dispersal. Thus, where the
sculptural classicism of the interwar period offered its viewers a reassuring im-
age of their own wholeness and autonomy—hence its popularity, as well as its
susceptibility to appropriation for right-wing propaganda—Picasso’s classical
prints emphasized the absence of that kind of self-possession, and more, its in-
herent impossibility.
How different the prints are in this regard from many of Picasso’s most
characteristic images, and how seemingly antithetical to the myth of Picasso that
has been handed down to us—the myth, that is, of the great master, in full com-
mand of his imagery and talent. So instrumental was that myth that, as Leo
Steinberg has shown us, possession became one of the guiding metaphors of the
artist’s work. He drew or painted as if to grasp his figures (on a model that was
as much physical as visual) in their entirety and all at once. Unwilling to restrict
himself to a given vantage point, and to the mere 180 degrees of his subject that
would have been visible from there, Picasso sought instead optical omnipotence,
the visual equivalent of an embrace. The resulting images, by displaying the com-
plete presence of their subjects, proclaim even more strongly the self-presence of
their artist, and of each individual viewer in turn.
Admittedly, his classical prints are not the only images by Picasso that re-
fuse to conform to this model. Many of the works for which he is best known—
namely, the cubist paintings and papiers collés—are likewise glaring exceptions.
Although the early champions of cubism often claimed that those images pre-
sented multiple aspects of their subjects simultaneously, the overriding impres-
sion the works themselves leave us with is of dispossession, of the depicted
figures’ and objects’ intangibility and elusiveness. To observe the development of
cubism over the course of its so-called analytic phase is, in effect, to watch vol-
ume and depth (and therefore physicality) drain from the image. The illusionis-
tically rendered, faceted forms of the early paintings gradually flatten and
fracture to become complicated but primarily two-dimensional intersections of
lines. Chiaroscuro modeling, as intense as in any Renaissance painting, remains,
yet it is so inconsistently applied as to prevent resolution into solid, volumetric
form. It’s as if the machinery of illusionism were malfunctioning, chugging on
without purpose, its devices laid bare.
At the start of that process (that is, in the paintings of 1908 and 1909)
there was a pronounced sense of three-dimensionality; that, after all, was much
of what motivated the assignation of the “cubist” epithet. Yet simultaneously,
and then with increasing frequency, flatness began to assert itself—as in those
places where, for example, the facade of a house bleeds into the ground upon
which it sits, or the neck of a guitar merges seamlessly with the wall behind. This
marked tension between two- and three-dimensionality has its precedent, of
course, in the art of Cézanne. Not coincidentally, it also has a certain affinity with
late nineteenth-century debates on the nature of perception. Associationist psy-
chologists at that time asserted that, contrary to one’s common sense of things,
vision does not actually have access to depth.1 The images formed on the retina
of the eye are, they claimed, utterly flat; it is only with the superaddition of re-
membered tactile and kinesthetic cues that the two-dimensional image is filled
out into the spatial plenum of the world as we experience it. In Cézanne’s paint-
ings there appears to be a constant probing of these perceptual possibilities. In
certain areas, and primarily through a careful modeling of hues, a strong sense of
the palpable emerges; yet elsewhere within the same canvas there will be a passage
or telescoping of planes through which the near and distant are made to abut
like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. With Picasso’s cubist paintings,
in turn, one senses an even greater conflict between the (retinally) flat and the
(corporeally) three-dimensional. Again, in the early works the two are held in
relatively equal tension. By 1910, however, in such paintings as Girl with a Mando-
lin (fig. 5.1), flatness has already gained the upper hand. In the maddening eva-
siveness of that nude figure and its partial submersion into the background, we
can perhaps experience, as Rosalind Krauss has suggested, something of the
198 poignant loss Picasso himself must have felt “as he watched depth and touch—
– what we could call the carnal dimensions—disappear, quite literally, from
199 sight.”2
Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin, 1910.

5.1
During the winter of 1911–1912 the last vestiges of the figure were erad-
icated, assimilated beyond recognition to the gridded-off plane of the picture.
Significantly, it was at precisely this moment that Picasso introduced language—
actual letters and words—into the space of the painting. His “Ma Jolie” (fig. 5.2),
the title of which is prominently written along the bottom edge of the canvas,
underlines the significance of the move. For that title, evoking as it does the beau-
tiful woman who is precisely not there, serves to register the poignancy of her ab-
sence even as it reinscribes her in the face of it. Language is suited to this task in
a way that iconic images are not, since, as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was
insisting at almost exactly this same time, words not only function in the absence
of their referents, they themselves belong to a system founded on absences and
spacings, on the interstices between words.3 ausência - linguagem - ma jolie
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
Picasso, “Ma Jolie,” 1911–1912.

5.2
serves to represent, in abbreviated fashion, the sound hole and front surface of a
guitar; in another, the very same shape designates instead the notched silhouette
of a violin. The pieces function, that is, like homonyms. But there are as well
more scandalous cases. Krauss has pointed out that in certain instances—her ex-
ample is the 1912 Violin (fig. 5.3)—indistinguishable signifiers (here, two pieces
of newspaper once belonging to a single sheet) are able to signify antithetical
terms: the front face of the instrument and the space behind it, planar surface and
atmospheric depth.5
Of the many insights to be gleaned from Picasso’s papiers collés, none would
prove more important than this, that the meaning and value of any element is in-
herently unstable and derives only from its position within a larger field of sig-
nification. Time and again in the works that followed, this point would be
reiterated. And yet it was a point frequently missed by Picasso’s contemporaries,
even in regard to cubism itself.6 The semiological turn of the later cubist paint-
ings and papiers collés marked a radical departure from the tradition of iconic rep-
resentation that had ruled painting since the Renaissance, introducing into the
history of Western art a mode of pictorial representation not tied to mimetic
likeness. With but a few exceptions, however, artists and critics of the period
overlooked the semiological import of the images and misunderstood their aban-
donment of mimesis. The elements of cubist composition were taken for signs
of an altogether different sort: directional markers on the road to abstraction, to
non-representational art.
As a result (and as we saw in the first chapter), when histories of modern-
ism first came to be written, cubism was coopted into a grand narrative of paint-
ing’s inexorable drive toward nonobjectivity. Picasso himself wanted nothing
to do with such histories. He shunned abstraction and equally resisted the pre-
scriptiveness of teleological views. Once cubism became widely regarded as hav-
ing initiated the move toward flatness and nonrepresentation, Picasso expanded
202 his repertoire to include images done in a classicizing style and whose figures ap-
– peared to have the weight and palpable presence of sculpture. Borrowing again
203 the terminology of Saussure, we might say that, whereas the advocates of ab-
Picasso, Violin, 1912.

5.3
straction clung to a fairly traditional, diachronic conception of style (one style
following another in succession), Picasso’s classical paintings asserted, by con-
trast, a synchronic view of things—any one style being but a selection from a range
of simultaneously available alternatives.
Those same classical paintings also helped to reveal that this field of alter-
natives is structured, much like language, around oppositions, though opposi-
tions that are intrinsically unstable and therefore subject to change. In the 1910s
and early 1920s, when works such as Three Women at the Fountain appeared (fig.
1.1), there was one overarching opposition on the verge of dominating the field:
that between modern art and art of the past, abstraction serving as the shibbo-
leth distinguishing the two. Picasso’s paintings, however, did much to upset that
opposition and thereby restructure the field. For what they brought into the open
and used to their advantage was the prevalence within critical discourse at the
time of the rhetoric of “purity.” According to the logic undergirding this rheto-
ric, one of the aims of modern painting was the purification of the medium, the
discovery and isolation of its absolute essence. Certainly abstraction had its place
here; illusionistic representation could easily be identified as an “impurity,” ex-
traneous to the medium of painting proper, and therefore quite dispensable. But
illusionism was, in many ways, peripheral to the crux of the “purist” argument,
implicated only by being in the service of what was felt to be the true threat,
namely anecdote or narrative. Visible just beneath the surface of this argument
are, as we’ve seen, the contours of Lessing’s Laokoon, with its emphatic insistence
on the necessary separation of the visual and literary arts. Following that logic,
many critics during the teens and twenties advocated “pure form” over “literary
content.” And it was by trading on precisely this antithesis that Picasso’s classi-
cal paintings made their way into the modernist canon; with their stolidly im-
passive figures, they appeared as uncompromisingly nonnarrative as any of the
artist’s earlier cubist works. In fact, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say
204 that it was at this moment of their assimilation, and partially through the agency
– of the classical paintings themselves, that modernism found its preferred rally-
205 ing cry in “purity” rather than “abstraction.”
Yet Picasso’s subsequent works no more adhered to this “purist” version

of modernism than his earlier ones had to the dogma of abstraction. When pu-
rity was posited as its own teleological end, Picasso declined to follow. It seems
clear that his classical paintings were intended less to set a new course for mod-
ern art than to destabilize the opposition that had been guiding the old. Such, in
any case, was their effect. Following the intervention of Picasso’s paintings of the
twenties, modernism was reconceived, this time with classicism as its ally. The
opposing side was likewise redrawn, its ranks comprised of what were perceived
to be the pair’s common foes: the narrative, the nonunified (and therefore non-
instantaneous), the otherwise impure.
Of course, this general opposition in turn became dominant—and very
much complicated by the fact that, during the interwar years, classicism was en-
listed in the service of right-wing propaganda. Rather than ceding the field, how-
ever, Picasso reentered it, this time with his several series of prints, all of them
plainly classical on the face of things, but in each of which many of the features
that had been opposed to or excluded by classicism also reentered. In their sub-
versive aspect, Picasso’s classicizing prints resemble what Roland Barthes re-
ferred to as a “third language.” The function of the latter Barthes explained via a
recollection from his childhood of playing the game Prisoner’s Base: “What I
liked best was not provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself to their
right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prisoners—the effect
of which was to put both teams back into circulation: the game started over again
at zero.”7 Like a third language, like the child playing Prisoner’s Base, Picasso’s
prints were meant to scatter the terms and restart the game—in this case, by
confounding the oppositions upon which classicism’s very identity was based.8
Despite their differences, the Metamorphoses illustrations, the Vollard Suite,
and the Minotauromachy all function along much the same lines: within the con-
text of images that at a glance appear wholly classical emerge elements of the
transient, the baroque, the subjective. In that sense, it must be acknowledged that
those prints are among Picasso’s most beautiful works—at least if, with Leiris, we
agree that “beauty is comprised not simply by the joining of opposing elements,
but by their very antagonism, by the altogether active way that one tends to erupt
in the other, making its mark like a wound, like devastation.”9
In view of their “beauty,” we might also want to note how extraordinarily
appropriate are the classical prints’ mythological references (and how fore-
sighted was Picasso’s initial impulse to illustrate the work of “a classical au-
thor—perhaps something mythological”). For the ambivalent structure of the
prints’ classicism is very much like the structure of myth. As Jean-Pierre Vernant
has written, myth
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

and practices. On the one hand are images (principally of female nudes) whose
subjects are given to us in their seeming entirety, and who as a result appear pal-
pably, unquestionably present; on the other are ambiguous, equivocal works, each
prone to “tensions and oscillations” between the very oppositions structuring its
meaning.
In light of this opposition, between two mutually exclusive—albeit mutu-
ally implicated—alternatives, we might conclude by considering once more the
much-vaunted myth of Picasso’s mastery. By now it will be evident that “myth”
is precisely the right term in this context, given that it denotes a site of contra-
diction, the entanglement of antitheses. But the appropriateness of “mastery”
should be no less evident. To the extent that it evokes the dialectic of the master
and slave, the term brings to our awareness the fact that Picasso’s “mastery” was
likewise achieved through his risking the loss of both self and meaning. Because
those risks were embraced most openly with the Minotauromachy, we might want
to observe, finally, that Picasso’s oeuvre as a whole is much like the mythological
figure of the Minotaur. Perhaps it would be better to say that the Minotaur is an
apt figure for that oeuvre as a whole (and not simply, as we argued earlier, for the
artist’s experience with that one print). In fact, we may even be inclined at this
point to agree with those who have seen the half-bull, half-man hybrid as a self-
portrait of Picasso—but only on condition we make clear that the reference is
less importantly to Picasso the man than it is to the body of work, irremediably
double, that is made to cohere under the name “Picasso.”
notes
1 In the Background of Picasso’s Classical Prints
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).
2. Pool, “Picasso’s Neo-Classicism,” 207.
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.
208 7. This antiteleological—but by no means reactionary—aspect of Picasso’s “classicism” has been

– persistently ignored in literature on the subject, with the result that the “classical period” paint-
ings are often condemned for being precisely what they were not: a capitulation on Picasso’s part
209
to the demands of external criticism. See, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority,
notes to pages 2–6

Ciphers of Regression,” October 16 (Spring 1981), 39–68.
8. “Picasso Speaks,” in Fry, Cubism, 167.
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.
11. L’Esprit Nouveau 9 (June 1921), n.p.
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-

posed photographs of a sculpted Greek kore, Seurat’s Le Chahut, and a cubist still life by Gris. In
subsequent issues they published essays on Fouquet, Poussin, Ingres, and Corot amid reproduc-
tions of modern art, in an effort to demonstrate the constancy of the laws of pictorial order.
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).
29. Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 437.
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

1. This, anyway, is how Picasso described the incident to Françoise Gilot; see her Life with Picasso
(New York, 1964), 191. Of course it is possible that events transpired otherwise, and in fact a
completely different scenario is given by Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso: catalogue de l’oeuvre gravé et li-
thographie, vol. 1 (Berne, 1968), 54. For our purposes, however, the veracity of the story is less im-
portant than the fact that Picasso, looking back on the project a decade after its completion, felt
that the choice of text had been crucial—so much so that he wanted to ensure that he received
most of the credit for having made it.
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-

cussed in chapters 3 and 4) to Guernica.
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.
16. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI.424–674.
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-

faut l’opinion de Lessing qui réservait expressément à la peinture et à la sculpture le soin de décrire,
pour confier à la poésie le double soin d’évoquer et d’animer.”
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.
35. Alpers, Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 78ff.

36. Neither of these sketches—of Aurora or of Daedalus and the Minotaur—was directly used by Pi-
casso in his Metamorphoses illustrations, despite the significance that the Minotaur was to assume in
his later work. If it is still tempting to see some connection between the sketch in La Coruña and
Picasso’s fascination with the creature, it must nonetheless be pointed out that Rubens’s Minotaur
is an inversion of Picasso’s—that is, it has a bull’s body and the face of a man.
It should also be noted that the provenance of the two sketches in La Coruña is difficult to
trace. They entered the collection of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes only on its founding in
1947. Prior to that time they were in the possession of the Biblioteca Publica of La Coruña—
though their whereabouts in the 1890s, when Picasso lived in the town, are uncertain. On the
recorded history of the paintings, see Alpers, Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 73–74.
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

that “while the new bride was wandering in the meadows, with her band of naiads, a serpent bit her
ankle, and she sank lifeless to the ground” (X.9–11). Picasso’s illustration thus seems truer to the
text than does Rubens’s, in which Orpheus is clearly present. It might be said, however, that Or-
pheus is not entirely absent from Picasso’s etching either, for the array of women around Eurydice’s
fallen body brings to mind the similar composition of the Death of Orpheus (see fig. 2.4 above), the
very next illustration within the volume.
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).
45. Held, Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, 255.
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-

standing Greek sculpture and the figure’s simultaneous nonparticularization were held to express
the perfect integration of the individual with the universal, the singular citizen with society at large.
Similar connotations seem to have attached to the formal relationship between the work as a whole
and its individual parts; again, complete integration was the ideal. When “classical” abstraction did
away with the human figure, however, it became the person of the artist that was seen as holding to-
gether these two potentially separate spheres of the social and the formal. It was then his relation
to tradition that was taken to be the fundamentally ethical matter. Picasso’s piecemeal borrowings
from other works of art was immoral, according to this rationale, because it not only sacrificed the
whole for the part but egoistically placed individual concerns ahead of the communal.
3 The Structure of the Vollard Suite
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.
3. Hans Bolliger, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite” (London, 1956), x.
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.
5. Bolliger, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” xiii.

6. The imagery of the Minotaur, as it appears in the Vollard Suite and in Picasso’s 1935 etching The
Minotauromachy, will be discussed in detail in chapter 4.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§66–67, as translated by Renford Bambrough,

“Universals and Family Resemblances,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 50 (1961), 208–209.
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.
9. Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum (1619), quoted in Rosand, “Capriccio,” 5.
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

readers reading for pleasure [or only once] will not pick up on all the allusions to what has pre-
ceded. But there are enough verbal and thematic echoes back and forth, enough reappearances of
characters and situations we have seen before, that we are bound to recognize some of them as old
friends when they emerge again.” Sara Mack, Ovid (New Haven and London, 1988), 112–113; also
see Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (Chapel Hill and London, 1988), esp.
9–14 on “The Search for Structure.”
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.
28. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 5, 596–597.
29. Ibid., 344.
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.
32. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 708.
33. Ibid.; translation slightly modified.
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

qu’il lui plait de prendre pour les contempler. Elles sont tactiles autant que visuelles, en un mot plastique.
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.
36. Hegel, Aesthetics, 806.
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.
43. Hegel, Aesthetics, 36–37.
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

identification does not so much draw us into the print as it makes us self-conscious of our posi-
tion outside it.
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.
56. Christopher White, Rembrandt as an Etcher (London, 1969), vol. 1, 161.
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,

in the words of Leo Steinberg, “about the claims of erotic attachment as against the vocation of
art,” Picasso seems to have construed the Rembrandt portrait as offering a resolution to any such
conflict. Because it is a self-portrait (that is, by Rembrandt’s own hand), the painting with Saskia
is able to present the Dutchman as both hedonistic lover and productive artist. In Picasso’s varia-
tion upon the work, Rembrandt is literally represented in both roles, his superimposed right and
left profiles allowing him to divide his attention equally between the woman on his lap and the can-
vas on his easel. For commentary on Picasso’s painting, see Jean Sutherland Boggs, “The Last
Thirty Years,” in John Golding and Roland Penrose, eds., Picasso in Retrospect (New York, 1973),
271; and Costello, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” 92–95. See also Leo Steinberg, “A Working Equation
or—Picasso in the Homestretch,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 3, no. 5 (November/December 1972),
102–105.
62. Gilot, Life with Picasso, 49.
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.
68. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 5, 599.
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.
4 Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs
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

Golding and Roland Penrose, eds., Picasso in Retrospect (New York, 1973), 49–78, especially 66–67.
Picasso’s main link to the group was Michel Leiris, with whom Picasso had been friends for some
time. Indeed, according to Jaime Sabartés, who was clearly in a position to know, Michel and Louise
Leiris were two of Picasso’s most frequent visitors during this period. See Sabartés, Picasso: An In-
timate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores (New York, 1948), 112.
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.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 728.
15. Ibid., 729.
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.
18. Ibid., 57.
19. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 5.

20. On the phenomenon of overdetermination, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,
trans. James Strachey (New York, 1965), 312ff.
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).

26. In many of Bataille’s writings of the period, from “The Solar Anus” and “Rotten Sun” to “The
Jesuve” and “The Pineal Eye,” the terms “eye,” “sun,” and “anus” are continually associated and pe-
riodically substituted one for another, in a manner not unlike that found in Picasso’s etching. On
the role of such paradigmatic substitution in Bataille’s writings, see Roland Barthes, “The
Metaphor of the Eye,” in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, 1972),
239–247.
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.
36. Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 257.
37. Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” 32–33.
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.
(Translated in Visions of Excess, 57.)
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.
43. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 254.
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.

See also, in that same collection, “The Notion of Expenditure,” especially 119: “From the very
first, it appears that sacred things are constituted by an operation of loss: in particular, the success
of Christianity must be explained by the value of the theme of the Son of God’s ignominious cru-
cifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.”
47. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. On agrarian sacrifices, see 66–76; for sacri-
fices involving birds, 54 and 57.
48. Cahiers d’art 8, nos. 7–10 (1933).
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).
55. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 17.

56. Ibid., 60.
57. Ibid., 10.
58. Ibid., 101.
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.
63. Leiris, “The Bullfight as Mirror,” 27–28.
64. Ibid., 37–38.
65. Ibid., 26.
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.

Michael Syrotinski (Venice, Calif., 1990). Although completed in 1935, the book was published
only posthumously, in 1981. Versions of chapters 1 and 3, however, appeared as articles in, re-
spectively, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 5 (May 1933) and Recherches philosophiques
(1934–1935). In addition, chapter 5 was published in a slightly scaled-down form in Minotaure 1,
no. 5 (1934), and later became the central section of Caillois’s Le Mythe et l’homme.
68. Caillois, The Necessity of the Mind, 23.
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).
71. Caillois, The Necessity of the Mind, 78.
72. Ibid., 109.
73. Ibid., 97.
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,

allows us to see the tremendous appropriateness of the Minotauromachy as a title. Given, it seems,
by Christian Zervos and Alfred Barr before Picasso’s 1936 New York retrospective, the title elides
the terms “Minotaur” and “tauromachy,” thereby neatly conveying the main compositional device
of the print: its association of diverse (overdetermining) elements around common points of ref-
erence. On the naming of the Minotauromachy, see Sebastian and Herma Goeppert, “Picassos Mino-
tauromachy,” in Picasso in der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 1981), 24–35.
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.
90. Caillois, Le Mythe at l’homme, 24.
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-

tion,” 39–148.
5 The Classical Prints in the Context of Picasso’s Oeuvre
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
Acéphale, 230 (n. 7) Barthes, Roland, 205, 233 (n. 26)

Alpers, Svetlana, 45 Bataille, Georges, 140–142, 148–166,
Altieri, Charles, 223 (n. 21) 172–173, 176, 180, 192–194, 219
Anti-narrative impulse in modern art, 6, 10, (n. 47), 230 (n. 7), 236 (n. 62)
39–42, 204 “L’Art primitif,” 161–162
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 3, 9, 218 (n. 39) “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,”
Ariadne, 151, 153, 188, 190, 220 (n. 50). 142, 170–172
See also Sleeping Ariadne on Hegel, 157–160, 170–172, 192
Aristotle, 9–10, 93, 211 (n. 27) “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” 157–160
Armstrong, Carol, 227 (n. 49) “Mouth,” 148–149, 170
Ashton, Dore, 229 (n. 63) and myth, 160–161, 193
Associationist psychology, 198 “The Notion of Expenditure,” 235
Automatic drawing, 15. See also Psychic (n. 46)
automatism “Rotten Sun,” 150–151, 160, 234
(n. 39)
Balzac, Honoré de: Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, and sacrifice, 153–163, 166, 173, 239
99, 132–135, 224 (n. 30), 229 (n. (n. 86)
63) “Sacrifices,” 155, 166
Barkan, Leonard, 62 “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed
256
Baroque art, 49–55, 218 (n. 39) Ear of Vincent van Gogh,” 160–161
– Barr, Alfred, 239 (n. 82) “The Solar Anus,” 151
257
Benesch, Otto, 125 Collège de Sociologie, 173, 235 (n. 53)
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)
Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, 7, 12 Ideogram, 181–184, 186, 238 (n. 76),

Galinsky, Karl, 42–44, 222 (n. 15) 239 (n. 87). See also Caillois, Roger
Gaze (Lacan), 240 (n. 91) Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 9, 211
George, Waldemar, 13, 24, 67–68 (n. 21), 229 (n. 61), 238 (n. 81)
Giacometti, Alberto, 233 (n. 28), 237–238
(n. 76) Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard (Le
Gilot, Françoise, 132, 213 (n. 1), 221 Corbusier), 33, 208 (n. 6), 211
(n. 2), 236 (n. 62) (n. 21), 212 (n. 28)
Gleizes, Albert, 208 (n. 6) Jung, Carl, 189
Gnosticism. See Bataille: “Base Materialism
and Gnosticism” Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 125, 132, 210
Goeppert, Sebastian, 235 (n. 50), 238 (n. 18), 241 (n. 6)
(n. 81) Kleinfelder, Karen, 232 (n. 21)
Goeppert-Frank, Herma, 235 (n. 50), 238 Knossos, 142, 230 (n. 4)
(n. 81) Kojève, Alexandre, 157–158
Gombrich, E. H., 9, 220 (n. 48) Koklova, Olga, 2
258
Goya, Francisco de, 86–90, 186–188, 190, Korai, 167, 211 (n. 21)
194, 222 (n. 13) Krauss, Rosalind, 198, 202, 217 (n. 27),
– Greek art. See Classical art 231 (nn. 10, 12), 233 (n. 28), 234
259
(n. 42), 237–238 (n. 76), 241 Metamorphosis, xvii, 49, 69, 219 (n. 47)
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
Mack, Sara, 223 (n. 17) Napoleon Bonaparte, 14

Maillol, Aristide, 66–67, 99, 103–104 Narrative. See Anti-narrative impulse in
Masson, André, 15, 140, 162, 164, 166, modern art
230 (n. 7) Naville, Pierre, 95–96
Le Crucifié, 155, 166, 170–172, 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 193, 232 (n. 21)
Furious Suns, 15, 17
Massacres, 153–155, 170 Objective chance, 184–185, 237–238
Minotaur, 155–156, 166 (nn. 75–77)
Master and slave, dialectic of, 158–159, Objective ideogram. See Ideogram
192, 207. See also Dialectic; Hegel Orpheus, 15, 22–24, 155, 219 (n. 42).
Mauss, Marcel, 92, 166, 173–176, 193, See also Picasso: Metamorphoses
234 (n. 41), 235 (n. 53) illustrations: Death of Orpheus
Mayer, Susan, 213 (n. 5), 220 (n. 49) Osiris, 155
Meleager Painter, 62, 66 Overdetermination, xvii, 151–153, 178,
Melville, Stephen, 231 (n. 16), 234 180–194, 237 (n. 69), 239 (n. 87)
(n. 35)
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso): . Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar, 35–39
Metamorphoses, 23–24, 28, 42–44, . Nestor’s Stories from the Trojan War, 24
45–46, 49, 52, 57, 61, 140, 194, . Numa Following the Lessons of Pythagoras, 24
213 (n. 4), 219 (n. 47) . placement within text, 21–24
compared to Virgil’s Aeneid, 15, 93 . Procris and Cephalus, 45–49
compared to Vollard Suite, 91–93, 96 . Sacrifice of Polyxena, 34–36, 215 (n. 19)
structure of, 15, 91–93, 213 (n. 3), . style of, 15–21, 52
223 (nn. 17, 21) . Tereus and Philomela, 28–33
Ozenfant, Amédée, 7, 33, 208 (n. 6), 210 . Vertumnus and Pomona, 62–68
(n. 16), 211 (n. 21), 212 (n. 28) . visual narrative in, 24–42, 64–67, 69
Minotaure cover, 140–141, 242 (n. 11)
Péret, Benjamin, 153 Minotauromachy, xvi–xvii, 165–194, 205,
Peruzzi, Baldassarre, 57–62, 219 (n. 44) 207, 239 (n. 82)
Petiet, Henri, 71, 221 (n. 2) papiers collés, 197, 200, 202, 206, 241
Picasso (n. 4), 242 (n. 11)
Balzac illustrations, 99–100, 132–135, The Peasants’ Repast, after LeNain, 218
224 (n. 30), 229 (n. 63) (n. 38)
classical period (1914–1925), 2, 3–4, sculptures from Gisors, 225–226
13, 202, 204–206, 208 (n. 6) (n. 38)
criticism of, 3–6, 13 statements by, 3, 4, 93–94, 117, 125,
and cubism, 3, 197–203 132, 163, 239 (n. 85)
The Dance, 212 (n. 32) Three Women at the Fountain, 5, 204, 218
Death of Marat, 153, 162–163, 170 (n. 39)
Girl with Mandolin, 198–199 Violin, 202–203, 206
Guernica, 215 (n. 12), 217 (n. 33) Vollard Suite, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 70–138,
Guitar, 212 (n. 32) 140–164, 165, 174, 178–180, 186,
“Ma Jolie,” 200–201 190, 205
Metamorphoses illustrations, xvi–xvii, 2–3, . “Battle of Love” series, 71, 90–91, 107–109,
13, 15–69, 70, 72, 105, 205 112–113, 116, 135, 144–145, 164
. Actaeon Transformed into a Stag, 42, 217 . “Blind Minotaur” series, 71–73, 145–164,
(n. 28) 166, 169, 179–180
. Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and . general description of, 70–71
Phineus, 55 . “Minotaur” series, 71, 81, 140–145, 164
. Daughters of Minyas, 24 . “Rembrandt” series, 71, 72, 125–136
. Death of Eurydice, 52, 219 (n. 42) . “Sculptor’s Studio” series, 71, 99–122,
. Death of Orpheus, 15–18, 22–24, 33–34, 142–144, 225 (n. 35)
260
215 (n. 15) . “Sleepwatch” images, 105–106
. Deucalion and Pyrrha, 57–62, 229 (n. 67) . structure of, 71–98
– . Fall of Phaethon, 49–52 Woman with Leaves, 167–168
261 . Hercules Slaying Nessus, 39–41 Woman with Stiletto, 232 (n. 24)
Poussin, Nicolas, 9, 49, 211 (n. 21), 218 . Daedalus and the Minotaur, 218 (n. 36)
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
Unconscious, 94–97, 137–138, 184–185,

237 (n. 69). See also Primary process
Unity, 52, 93, 211 (n. 27)
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 206, 223 (n. 18)

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro): Aeneid, 15,
93, 213 (n. 2)
Vollard, Ambroise, 71, 221 (n. 1), 224
(n. 30). See also Picasso: Vollard Suite
Vorsterman, Lucas, 236 (n. 59)
White, Christopher, 128

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 10, 11, 196
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61, 84–85
Zervos, Christian, 18, 21, 39, 239 (n. 82)
262
–
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myth and metamorphosis

t h e m i t p r e ss • c ambridge, massachusetts • london, england

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Florman, Lisa Carol.

1 In the Background of Picasso’s Classical Prints 2

2 Metamorphic Images: Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid 14

3 The Structure of the Vollard Suite 70

4 Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs 140

5 The Classical Prints in the Context of Picasso’s Oeuvre 196

All works by Pablo Picasso © 2000 Estate 2.1

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

Picasso, Three Women at the Fountain, 1921.

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

On the surface at least, Picasso’s return to a classicizing mode in his prints of

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

Masson, Furious Suns, 1925.

Engraving of an Etruscan mirror.

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

sufficiently similar to a number of Picasso’s other works of the period that we

scopic image of motion. Unable to grasp both views simultaneously, we run

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

Picasso, La Coiffure, 1954.

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

Rubens, The Fall of Phaethon, 1636.

Rubens, The Death of Eurydice, 1636.

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

indispensable figures of Deucalion and Pyrrha—indeed, omitting everything

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

Rubens, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1636.

Much to Delaunay’s pique, Picasso proceeded as if there were no “funda-

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

to etching and drypoint, but here, apparently challenged by Goya’s example, he

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

In making these claims, Romains was implicitly endorsing the Hegelian

the structure of the vollard suite

In the self-containment of the sleeping nude, her obliviousness to the

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

the structure of the vollard suite

of myth and picasso’s minotaurs

of myth and picasso’s minotaurs

By contrast, the human face, particularly as presented in classical art, is struc-

This head-to-head comparison appears as part of a larger argument in

of myth and picasso’s minotaurs

of myth and picasso’s minotaurs

a collaboration with Bataille that eventually culminated in an album entitled,

of myth and picasso’s minotaurs