P a b l o P i c a s s o
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O i l o n p a n e l
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Like many Spainiards, Picasso saw his first bullfights when he was still a child perched on his father's knee. His earliest surviving painting (done when he was eight) is of a picador, the horseman who drives a lance into the bull in order to weaken it before the final phase of the spectacle.
The passion was a lifelong one, despite Picasso's long absences from his native land, but two visits to Spain in the early 1930s evidently played a part in reintroducing the corrida into his art.
In this painting, and in its companion of the same year, Death of the Female Toreador, Picasso portrayed not the death of the bull - the normal culmination of the ritual - but one of those rarer occasions when the matador was fatally gored. By contrast, the death of the picador's horse, its entrails dangling, was a commonplace event; but Picasso fused the two into a single scene, all the more intense for almost overfilling the picture area.
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Source: Life and Works of Picasso
Further Reading: Biography I
Further Reading: Life of Picasso
Further Reading: Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau
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