Let anyone who would know the secret of things first learn geometry. It is as if all things are generated from straight lines that bend and circles that yield to angles as lines and circles do in Picasso’s painting. Geometry pervades the canvas in small details, e.g. on the open hand of the fallen warrior, and in the large triangles that give a sense of order to the chaotic images. Against the angles and straight lines rounded images emerge, human faces, distorted as if yielding to a linear force. There is a brooding fatalism about the painting; the human figures seem the playthings of impersonal forces that are beyond human governance. The bull is the only figure that expresses no anguish; it presides over the scene with an idiotic look, as if to say– how has it all come to this, this terrible suffering? The bull, the horse, and the fallen warrior are potentially expressive of the corrida and the painting as whole displays the tragic meaning of that event – life in death and death in life, an event that plays itself out in war as it does in all things. We can imagine the bull as Picasso himself viewing from the safe distance of his Paris studio a torn and scattered world that is only a heartbeat away. He is the idiot, a man alone, as Aristotle says, not fully human, a beast or god. The black and white of the painting, blending into shades of gray, underscore the elemental, geometrical struggle that the painting represents. Tragedy is inherent in the nature of things. The artist triumphs over that tragedy by making it at once devastating and beautiful.
Post a comment
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.
Your Information
(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)
Comments