Picasso's Bull Lithograph of 1945

Bull ( Plate I. - December 5 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)
Museum of Modern Art, New York


Pablo Picasso created 'Bull' around the Christmas of 1945. 'Bull' is a suite of eleven lithographs that have become a master class in how to develop an artwork from the academic to the abstract. In this series of images, all pulled from a single stone, Picasso visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essential presence through a progressive analysis of its form. Each plate is a successive stage in an investigation to find the absolute 'spirit' of the beast.

To start the series, Picasso creates a lively and realistic brush drawing of the bull in lithographic ink. It is a fresh and spontaneous image that lays the foundations for the developments to come.

Picasso used the bull as a metaphor throughout his artwork but he refused to be pinned down as to its meaning. Depending on its context, it has been interpreted in various ways: as a representation of the Spanish people; as a comment on fascism and brutality; as a symbol of virility; or as a reflection of Picasso's self image.





Bull ( Plate II. - December 12 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

At the second stage of the lithograph, Picasso bulks up the form of the bull to increase its expressive power and achieve a more mythical presence.






Bull ( Plate III. - December 18 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

On Plate III. the development takes a change of direction. Picasso stops building the beast and starts to dissect the creature with lines of force that follow the contours of its muscles and skeleton. He cuts into the form of the bull much in the same way as a butcher would cut up a carcass. In fact, he was known to have joked with the printers about this butcher analogy. Also at this stage, Picasso introduces the use of a lithographic crayon to add more detail to the surface texture of the animal's skin. The overall effect is reminiscent of Dürer's famous images of a rhinoceros.







Bull ( plate IV. - December 22 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

Plate IV. sees the artist start to abstract the structure of the bull by simplifying and outlining the major planes of its anatomy.

Ten years earlier Picasso had said that "A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions." In view of this statement, lithography seems to be the most natural choice of media for this series of prints. One of the technical advantages of lithography over other printmaking techniques is that you can both add to and subtract from the image with relative ease.




Bull ( plate V. - December 24 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

The simplification and stylisation of the image continues on Plate V. Picasso starts to erase sections of the bull in order to redistribute the balance and reorganise the dynamics between the front and the rear of the creature.

First, he reduces its massive head and compresses its features into the small area that was previously the bull's forehead. By enlarging the eye and flattening its horns into a more lyrical design, he creates a sharper focal point at the front of the animal.

Next, he erases a section of the back which has the counter effect of raising the front. He literally underlines this change with the bold white line that runs diagonally across the animal, parallel to the new angle of the back. As a counterbalance to this movement, he strengthens a line that runs in the opposite direction across the middle of the body, parallel to the shoulders at the front.

Picasso's process of development is like building a house of cards where balance and counterbalance of the individual elements is crucial to the stability of the whole.



Bull ( plate VI. - December 26 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

At this stage, another new head and tail are created to conform to the style and direction of the developing image.

Picasso introduces more curves to soften the network of lines that crisscross the creature. Once again he adjusts the line of the back which now begins as wave on the shoulders and flows like a pulse of energy along the length of its body. The two counterbalancing lines discussed in the previous plate are extended down the front and back legs to act like structural supports for the weight of the bull. All three of these lines intersect at a point that suggests the bull's center of balance. Through the development of these drawings, Picasso is beginning to understand the displacement of weight and balance between the front and rear of the animal.



Bull ( plate VII. - December 28 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

As Picasso recognizes the balance of form in the bull, he starts to remove and simplify some of the lines of construction that have served their function. He then encases the essential elements that remain in a taut outline.




Bull ( plate VIII. - January 2 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

Plate VIII. continues the reduction and simplification of the image into line with another reconfiguration of the head, legs and tail.




Bull ( plate IX. - January 5 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

While continuing to have fun with the drawing of the head, Picasso now erases the remaining areas of tone and finally reduces the bull to a line drawing. Only the creature's reproductive organ retains its shading in order to emphasise its gender.





Bull ( plate X. - January 10 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

At this penultimate stage, the more complex areas of the line drawing are removed to leave only a few basic lines and shapes that characterize the fundamental forces and correlation of forms in the creature.





Bull ( plate XI. - January 17 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

In the final print of the series, Picasso reduces the bull to a simple outline that is so carefully considered through the progressive development of each image, that it captures the absolute essence of the creature in as concise an image as possible.

A fresh look at a Cubist picture by Picasso

THE WASHINGTON POST

Published: April 5, 2009

WASHINGTON

To watch a great art thinker's mind at work, we asked T.J. Clark to have a go at a Picasso that he hadn't known before, an untitled still life from 1918. It hangs in the East Building of the National Gallery.

The black

Clark had never really thought about Picasso's still life until we put him face to face with it. In reproductions that he's glimpsed, he's found the whole thing "terribly jolly." Not praise, coming from Clark. Standing in front of it, he's immediately struck by the "extraordinary black border" that wraps around three sides. That makes the whole scene graver, he says, noting how Picasso's black border creates a special tension between the "lighthearted bric-a-brac" that fills the painting's table and a sense of "grim confinement."

Coming very close to the painting, Clark points out how the dark paint actually covers areas in its bottom half that were once the same lively turquoise found on the painting's vase and cards. (The earlier paint peeks through cracks in the darker tones laid overtop.) Picasso, standing before his half-finished picture, seems to have had the same concerns about its "jolliness" as Clark.

Once Picasso had revised and completed the picture, Clark notes, he laid down a blood-red signature that crosses over between dark border and bright scene, laying claim to both.

The space

Clark is interested in the confined spaces and interiors you get in Picasso. Even when a picture's so kaleidoscopic that you can't make out the objects in it, he says, Picasso almost always gives a sense of the domestic space they're in. And, of course, you get just such a space in this picture's view into the corner of a room. Picasso, the great hater of abstraction, was always committed to delivering "something solid and felt," Clark said.

Stepping far back from the picture, Clark shows how well Picasso has achieved his end. What had looked like cubist complexities from up close resolve into a clear sense of a cluttered table standing in a corner with a chair. However close a Picasso painting comes to abstract pattern, Clark said, it has to "relate to some particular situation" in the real world.

Rather than dwelling on making each object separately clear and visible, that is, Picasso "wants to show us the way things in a certain world fit together." Picasso asks himself: "How imperiously can I play with these particular identities and still have them contribute to an overall interior?"

The past

For all its radically modern look, Clark said, the enclosed world seen in Picasso's pictures is essentially nostalgic. They depict the cozy world of a 19th-century bourgeois. For Picasso, Clark says, the bourgeoisie is a social force that is "both confining and wonderful." His interiors register that confinement, but they also revel in the comforts and objects that they gather into "the familiar space of the room."

Picasso had painted such old-fashioned rooms even when he was living in the mess of his unheated studio at the Bateau Lavoir. By 1918, when he's actually achieved the comforts of the bourgeoisie, he seems to step back from them -- to frame them in black and hold them up to sight.

The objects

Picasso depicts the "stock properties" of bohemian sociability -- guitar, sheet music, cards, fruit bowl, even maybe an absinthe spoon and glass at the front edge of the table. They are, Clark said, "utterly banal and familiar things -- they stand for the sufficiency of the bohemian world."

That world is "a mixture of the celebratory and the down-at-heels," Clark said. "Never was a carpet less luxurious -- or the stuffing in a chair." Although, in a typically Picassoid oxymoron, that down-at-heels carpet is also the one place in the painting where the artist resorts to showy brushwork.

By 1918, however, this very successful painter barely had a foot left in bohemia. His still life is looking back at something the artist has lost. The longer we look at the painting, Clark says, the more clearly it seems to be about "its stock properties being stock." Its vase and playing cards are cartoons of themselves, the fruits in its fruit bowl become four black-edged blobs of pink. "Never has fruit been more vestigial."
The moment

It, 1918, wasn't a good year for Europe, exhausted by a four-year war. If the painting wears black, that could be why.

Yet Clark insists that the picture is not portentous or histrionically doom-laden. Clark could imagine someone asking, "How dare a painter paint cards and a guitar in 1918 -- how can this painting be other than trivial?" And that's the question Picasso answers, in a painting of "tremendous gravity." Picasso, Clark said, wants us to "enter its world of familiar delights, but full of a sense of that world being something to struggle for."

The artist

The great achievements of cubism were over when this still life was painted, and there was a real risk that the movement was becoming empty style. "He knows that the moves are becoming too pre-established," Clark said. This last moment of cubism has the "terminal flavor" of "a language tremendously conscious of itself as a language, on the verge of just sedimenting up." The airless, lightless scene in this 1918 still life, Clark said, "is on the verge of not being vivid."

Clark wonders if Picasso uses the black border on this picture to show that he's aware of this. His border presents the scene as a work of art, as a framed picture, rather than as an unmediated view into a real portion of real space. That is, the painter is letting us know that he knows that his moves are starting to be more about painting than about the vivid world that they once showed.

Whereas earlier, fully cubist pictures, which tended to trail off into open blankness at their sides, had simply let us sense their space, without all the editorializing.

In this still life, then, Picasso's sense of space has started to register as a particular sense of confinement -- the confinement of a painter who feels trapped in an artistic style, too far from reality and truth.