PABLO PICASSO 1881-1973
Minotaure aveugle guidé par une fillette, I, from La Suite Vollard, 1934

etching on parchment, image size: 24,7 × 33,8 cm; sheet size: 41 × 53,4 cm

numbered and signed in red ink: 1/3 – Picasso

From the edition of 3

PROVENANCE
Collection Walter Kern, Winterthur/Uttwil.
Thence by descent to a private collection, Switzerland

Catalogue raisonné:
Bloch, 222; Geiser-Baer, 434.XIII.a.

PRICE
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Artists almost never used parchment for prints. It is far more expensive and technically demanding than paper. One of the few exceptions is Rembrandt, who experimented with it in the 1650s. Rembrandt was one of the artists Picasso admired most, and Picasso may have been directly inspired by his seventeenth-century Dutch predecessor.
Picasso used parchment for prints only once: in the deluxe edition of the Suite Vollard. All sheets in that edition were individually numbered and signed by the artist in red ink. Opportunities to see one of the three known examples of these parchment proofs are exceptionally rare.
The mysterious subject is set in an ancient Greek register. Half-man, half-bull, the Minotaur often functions in Picasso’s work as an alter ego, a figure of sheer power, creativity and lust. Here, the Minotaur is different. He is weak, lost, suffering and blind. He helplessly depends on a walking stick and reaches out, feeling around in the emptiness. But there is a little girl with flowers in her arms who is the Minotaur's salvation. She holds his hand and seems to guide him onto the right path. Who is this girl? And who is the young man on the left who is gazing thoughtfully and somewhat reservedly at the Minotaur? Also the two fishermen in the background are looking towards the Minotaur, but with a different, rather amazed, expression.
It is remarkable that Picasso also depicted another, separate scene to the left of the main subject. Although it has been forcefully crossed out, it remains important - Picasso wouldn’t have deliberately left it there otherwise. What does it show? Because the scene is depicted upside down, it is not easy to decipher. In an interior space lit by a window, a fury-like creature seems about to stab a sleeping, possibly winged, woman with a sword. What is the meaning of this disturbing image?
Can the subject perhaps be explained at least partly autobiographically? Around the time when Picasso created this print his secret affair with the much younger Marie-Thérèse Walter took a turning point: she became pregnant while he was still married to his first wife, Olga Koklova. Is the disoriented Minotaur a symbol for Picasso as a man torn between his lover and his wife and family? Is the subject an allegory of the artist before the chasm of an affair that cannot be hidden anymore? Does the scene to the left even allude to the desperate thought of killing his lover? Does it show the fight against his darkest side? Or is there a suggestion of sacrifice here? At any rate, the innocent little girl, whose identity remains a mystery, stops the blind Minotaur and guides him through this deep crisis. Is she an allegory for Picasso's artistic inspiration? Could the adolescent on the left be Picasso's son Paul, who at the time was thirteen years old? Does the Minotaur reach out his hand in search of him? While this print illustrates Picasso’s inner turmoil, there is more to it. It is laden with symbols and allusions, with references to Greek and to Picasso’s own personal mythology, experience and perhaps his nightmares. Like the artist’s hybrid alter ego, the blind Minotaur, it defies any single, rigid interpretation.
“If all the ways I have been along were marked upon a map and joined up in a line, it might represent a minotaur.” Picasso.