Martin Gayford

Animal magnetism

Martin Gayford talks to the artist’s friend and biographer John Richardson about Picasso’s lifelong obsession – and the art that inspired it

‘I frequently went to bullfights with Picasso,’ Sir John Richardson remarked, quite casually, as he showed me around the exhibition Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors, which he was installing at the Gagosian Gallery, Grosvenor Hill. He mentioned this by way of explaining why a large and splendid linocut was inscribed to him by the artist: ‘à mon cher ami.’

They saw many fights together in the 1950s, either in Nîmes or Arles. Picasso took these occasions seriously. ‘If the fight was going well he was silent, concentrating totally. What he couldn’t stand was people talking. He would sigh and say, “Oh, I wish they’d shut up.” All around him people were shrieking if something went wrong, but he was absolutely cool as can be.’

Picasso was an aficionado, an ardent devotee of the sport; similarly, Richardson himself is an aficionado of Picasso, combining vast knowledge of his work with an intimate day-to-day acquaintance with the artist, a sense of how Picasso thought and felt. It is now 37 years since he embarked on his immense Life of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared to date (the third taking the narrative only up to 1932).

Richardson was drawn to the work even before he encountered the man. At 14 years old, still a schoolboy at Stowe, he saw a copy of ‘La Minotauromachie’ (1935), at Zwemmer’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Now regarded as Picasso’s greatest print, this etching was then recent and priced at £50. He asked his mother for an advance on his allowance to buy it, but instead she gave Mr Zwemmer a dressing-down: ‘It’s a disgrace trying to palm off this stuff on children!’

The minotaur, like the bullfight, was a frequent theme in Picasso’s art. Together these two interlinked subjects — the bull-man and matador killing the bull — make up the Gagosian exhibition.

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