The bullfight was a lifelong subject for Pablo Picasso, who is recorded as having been drawn to la corrida from his childhood in Málaga to his late years in the south of France, with the Museu Picasso in Barcelona tracing bullfighting images in his work from his childhood to the matadors of the 1970s, and his first print, of 1899, showed a picador holding a lance. When he settled near Vallauris, a town that had only recently begun to allow bullfighting, the subject returned at full strength in prints celebrating the town’s corridas and in the colour linocuts of the late 1950s, among them Le Banderillero of 1959, which the Minneapolis Institute of Art describes as a “brutal, balletic scene” of an arena full of spectators, a banderillero at work and the bull lunging with its head lowered.
The subject runs across the media here, since after meeting the potters at Madoura he painted bullfighting scenes onto serving dishes, so that the plate became a stage, and the ceramic dishes of 1952 to 1957 sit beside the linocuts of 1959, in which a black bull, a picador and a red and yellow lance are cut into a single block, and a lithograph of 1961 on the play of the cape, so that the group follows the corrida from the quick marks of the early plates to a late ceramic of 1968 that sets women beside a torero, the bullring still the subject of his work some fifteen years after he first took it up in clay.
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