La Tauromaquia

La Tauromaquia was first commissioned by Gustau Gili Roig in Paris in 1928. Under the imprint Ediciones de la Cometa, Gili Roig sought to expand his firm's programme and publish literary texts illustrated with original prints. The aim was to produce livres d'artiste with some of the leading artists of the time for the international bibliophile market. The scale of Gili Roig’s ambition was apparent not only by his decision to approach Picasso as the artist, but also by the choice of the subject and literary source: written in 1796 by the legendary bullfighter José Delgado, colloquially known as Pepe Illo, La Tauromaquia ó arte de torear is the first documented handbook for bullfighting. The text was also the inspiration for Francisco de Goya’s Tauromaquia, first published in 1816, widely recognised as one of the greatest print series in the history of European art. Amongst other gruesome scenes, Goya had depicted Pepe Illo’s fatal goring by the bull Barbudo as the final plate in the suite.

Gili Roig’s original project was intended to include ten etchings and it was begun without delay: by June 1929 Picasso had already produced six etchings. Then it floundered and Picasso did not return to it, with the Spanish Civil War putting an end to any such undertakings. The six etchings (Baer 136-141) were printed only in a few proof impressions, most of which are kept together with the plates at the Musée Picasso in Paris.

In 1956, Gustau Gili Esteve, the son and heir to the business, contacted Picasso and visited him in Cannes, with a view to resurrecting his father’s idea. They immediately struck up a rapport and the artist agreed to revisit the subject. It would have been very unlike Picasso to return to the old plates and complete what he had begun nearly three decades earlier. Instead, he approached it as an entirely new – and greater – endeavour.

As early as 1934, the famous printer Roger Lacourière, in whose workshop the Tauromaquia would later be printed, had introduced Picasso to the sugar-lift aquatint technique, which allowed the artist to paint loosely onto the plate with a brush, rather than working up the image with the fine lines of the etching needle. This ingenious method is based on the fact that a sugar solution solidifies when dried, but dissolves again when exposed to water: the design is applied to the plate, then left to dry, before the plate is covered entirely with the etching ground. It is then immersed in water. Where the sugar solution has been applied, it liquifies and the etching ground begins to lift off, exposing the copper plate. Placed in the acid bath, the exposed copper is bitten and the design etched into the plate.

Picasso had occasionally dabbled with the technique, but it was with the Tauromaquia that he realised its full potential. He created each of the 26 plates in a single sitting, painting each scene swiftly, using a mixture of sugar, water and ink, with a brush onto the metal. The scenes are rendered with an extraordinary economy recalling the fluid precision of Chinese brush paintings.

Picasso, a life-long aficionado of the bullfight and regular visitor of the arenas in Spain and the South of France, knew and admired Goya’s La Tauromaquia, which traces in 33 images the history of the bullfight from its origins in rural bull hunts and the earliest formal fights in Moorish times to its development as a courtly pursuit and finally the various manoeuvres and mishaps of the public spectacle as it was performed in Goya’s own time by the celebrated toreadors of the day. Picasso’s Tauromaquia, by contrast, recounts the course of a single corrida, beginning with the bulls in the pasture, followed by the various, ritualized stages of the fight, from the entry into the arena to the killing of the bull with the sword.

Goya’s subtle use of aquatint is suggestive of the dusty atmosphere in the bullring divided by sunshine and shade, while his close-up perspectives convey a sense of drama and danger.

While Goya throws the viewer seemingly right into the tumult of the ring, Picasso depicts the corrida as seen from the stands of the arena. He is less interested in the violence and drama of the fight than in the corrida as a highly formalised performance. Rendered in stark black and white, with large areas of the sheet left blank, suggesting the brilliance of the midday sun, the figures – men and beasts – take on a sculptural quality. Each moment of the bullfight is a tableau vivant, with the toreadors and the bull placed in a composition, like dancers on a stage. At the same time, the spontaneous, sketch-like quality of Picasso’s marks conveys a sense of the fleeting nature of each encounter. La Tauromaquia celebrates the grace and beauty of the corrida – an art form in itself, aiming for elegance, tension, and poise.

Together, the 26 prints form a highpoint of Picasso’s graphic oeuvre, a coherent expression of a style and technique employed in this purity only once, in this series of etchings. La Tauromaquia was finally published by Gili in 1959 in a unsigned edition of 263 copies, with some additional sets reserved for collaborators. For the cover, Picasso created a drypoint etching of a bull in a landscape with a kite flying high above it, a reference to the name of the imprint, Ediciones de la Cometa (cometa being the word for kite in Spanish). The present set comes from the deluxe edition of 12 copies only, printed on a nacré paper especially produced for this edition by the Guarro papermill, with each print signed by the artist in red crayon. The present copy, acquired directly from the publisher shortly after its release, is unusually numbered in that each print is inscribed with the respective plate number and the copy number 4. Signed sets such as the present one are extremely rare. Several have been separated and dispersed, and to our knowledge only one has been offered at auction within the last thirty years.