ART REVIEW : GOYA, PICASSO AS RINGMASTERS

To the uninitiated, bullfighting and printmaking might sound like strange aesthetic bedfellows, but they are the fascinating subject of “La Tauromaquia: Goya, Picasso and the Bullfight” at USC’s Fisher Gallery, through Feb. 18.

Apart from providing a rare opportunity to see the two Spanish masters’ renowned “Tauromaquia” print series side by side, the exhibit also raises a number of provocative questions about connoisseurship and populism in both the corrida spectacle and the art of printmaking itself.

Co-curated by Verna Curtis of the Milwaukee Art Museum and USC’s Selma Holo, the exhibit places the works of Goya and Picasso in a social and historical context, supplementing their prints with bullfighting paraphernalia (the matador’s traditional “Suit of Lights,” ceremonial cape and sword, a picador’s hat, banderillas ) as well as historic posters, broadsides and popular prints from the “Golden Age” of bullfighting at the turn of the 19th Century.

Goya and Picasso were true bullfight aficionados, yet their treatment of this passionate communal ritual couldn’t be further apart. Goya’s series of 33 prints, a combination of etching, aquatint and drypoint, was laboriously completed over a two-year period from 1815 to 1816, a time when many considered the bullfighting art to be in serious decline. A child of the Enlightenment, Goya made his series appropriately didactic, teaching moral and historical lessons through the deliberate juxtaposition of beauty and horror, skill and brutality.

He begins his series with a touch of nationalism, rooting bull hunting firmly in ancient Spanish history. Its initial ritualization and elegance as a sport is attributed to the Moors, before it gave way to the refinements of Spanish Christians in the early 17th Century. Goya eschews obvious chronological and thematic unity, however, in favor of a more expressive discontinuity, allowing him to better underline the tragic and heroic consequences of man pitted against beast, and by extension, himself.

Thus in “The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apinani in the Ring at Madrid,” the athletic torero is mythologized for his virtuosity and prowess as he leaps acrobatically over the charging bull. Rendered like most of the series in subtle chiaroscuro, the two antagonists are placed in the middle foreground against a sketchily drawn backdrop of crowd and wooden barrier. The viewer is placed in the ring itself, seemingly just a few feet away from the primal conflict. The composition is gracefully balanced, accentuated by the shadowy merger of matador and bull as the bright afternoon sun beats across the bullring.

Immediately following this print, however, Goya has strategically placed that of a major tragedy. The bull, having jumped into the front rows of the crowd, is wreaking havoc and carnage amid spectators as they try to scurry to safety. The scenario is depicted asymmetrically, with all the action pushed toward the right of the picture frame, a marked contrast to the classical composition of the rest of the series. In this respect, the piece is very reminiscent of Goya’s famed “Disasters of War” series (completed just two years earlier) and the visceral executions of the “2 May” and “3 May 1808” paintings.

Compared to the benign, popular bullfighting pictorials of contemporaries like Antonio Carnicero (also on display), Goya’s work is notable not only for its complex humanism, but also for its acute political acumen. As in the best of his work, the artist manages to draw the universal from the particular, the ethical from the most savage of scenarios.

Where Goya leans toward didactic Sturm und Drang , Picasso is predominantly sweetness and light, preferring to highlight the bullfight’s carnival atmosphere and balletic grace rather than dwell on its inherent dangers and potential abuses. His printmaking methods are in perfect sync with this approach. Completed in one inspired afternoon in 1957, his series of 26 aquatints began life as book illustrations for a reprint of matador Pepe Illo’s classic manual on bullfighting, first published in 1796.

The plates are marked by a loose, almost lyrical execution akin to the intuitive spontaneity of Japanese calligraphy. Rendering bull, toreros and crowd in a series of economical strokes, Picasso places the viewer high up in the arena, looking down on events with all the detached amusement of a typical fan. In contrast to Goya’s preference for an unrelenting, eye-level viewpoint of tragic events, we are instead witness to a fluidly choreographed spectacle that traces the bullfight from the ceremonial entrance of the toreros to the inevitable death and removal of the bull.

It’s very ironic that Picasso, who throughout his career identified so much with the mythological symbol of the bull/Minotaur, should treat the noble beast with such clinical detachment in this particular series. Significantly, Goya drew the line at humiliating the animal and ended his series not with the death of the bull but with the fatal goring of the overly flamboyant matador, Pepe Illo himself. For Goya, human hubris clearly wreaks its own nemesis. Picasso’s personal ambiguity perhaps lies in Jean Cocteau’s suggestion that the artist saw himself as both matador and bull, and that “by a kind of self-slaying he destroys what he was only yesterday, in order to become a new Picasso.”

Psychological implications aside, the exhibit’s chief interest lies in its symbiotic relationship between the academic and popular sides of both bullfighting and printmaking. The former is well illustrated in the prints themselves as, like Hemingway, both artists viewed the spectacle as true elitist connoisseurs.

The high art of bullfighting thus finds its ideal pictorial metaphor in the high art of the print. On the other hand, as the related popular paraphernalia illustrates, the bullfight also belongs to the homogeneous crowd, in much the same way as American football or baseball “belongs” to the television audience. Just as the average gallery or museum goer might not share the cognoscenti’s delight in seeing the rejected plates and deteriorating serial proofs on display here, so the lowest-common-denominator spectator might not know a first-class pass from a bad one.

It is Picasso who bridges the esoteric-populist gap, largely by applying printmaking, in particular the simple hard-edge line of the linocut, to the commercial bullfight poster. The exhibit thus turns full chronological circle, from Carnicero’s simple 18th-Century illustrations to a modern master’s witty, if somewhat trivial advertisements. Goya, with his high-minded morality, somehow gets lost in the middle. Perhaps the wonder of this entire exhibit is that one has the rare opportunity to walk out of a gallery thinking that Picasso, of all people, is the lesser of two artists.