Picasso - Le Combat

Although Picasso created the world he inhabited--and bequeathed to us--he was still to some degree the product of his times. The bullfight, that quintessentially Spanish pastime, served as the springboard for his imagination and, coupled with his passion for Greco-Roman antiquity, may have given rise to this print, a fanciful amalgam of mythology and combat in an arena.

The bullfight was the idiom of his culture and the poetry of his youth. It amused and enthralled him throughout his life and served as a metaphor for much of his commentary on the human condition. On the surface, Combat in the Arena depicts gladiators in an ancient Roman arena, a fitting nod to antiquity and perhaps to the precedents of the modern bullfight. The horned combatant, a faun, leads his horse by its mane in pursuit of a fallen gladiator; the faun in turn is pursued by a second gladiator. At a somewhat deeper level, we can’t help being struck by the circularity of motion, perhaps suggesting the circularity of conflict, the senselessness of each person attacking the next in a circle. The choreography of conflict, the dance of death, first depicted in his Femme Torero etchings of a few years earlier (see Bloch 280 in this catalog), some of which were included in the Vollard Suite, is echoed here, and a quarter of a century later in his bullfight lithographs and linoleum cuts. In this battle scene we find a smile on the face of the horse and even on that of one of the combatants.

Picasso finished Guernica in June of 1937. Combat in the Arena was created several months later on October 10, just 16 days before the great Weeping Woman in the Tate Modern. Nonetheless, this lighthearted view of conflict clearly lacks the rage of Guernica. Picasso seemingly is as moved to laughter at the senselessness of conflict as angered by the anguish it wreaks. With certain notable exceptions such as Guernica, Picasso generally chose to refer only obliquely to the violence of his times. As he explained to an American war correspondent who sought him out at this studio in Paris just days after its liberation, "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done." (S.A. Nash, Picasso and the War Years, 1937-1945, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1998, p. 13). Nash comments as follows: "Aside from his great Guernica of 1937 and The Charnel House of 1945-1946, Picasso's work from the war-torn years of 1937 to 1945 essentially ignores specific world events. Yet no other artist of the twentieth century left so sustained a moving visual record of the corrosive effect of war on the human spirit and its toll on human life. His achievement was to create a modern alternative to history painting. Through his treatment … he captured a portrait of an era that rises above the strictly personal to comment memorably on life in the shadow of war and the spiritual negativism that resulted, when traditional religion was futile and the ancient furies, all too alive for Picasso, wreaked havoc on humanity. The more narrowly autobiographical or hermetic focus of much of Picasso’s art at this point expands into a give-and-take with history and an interaction with momentous world events." (ibid., pp. 13-14).

Picasso created but sixteen prints in 1937 (only a few of which are shown in Bloch), but they comprise some of the most artistically significant and politically inclined in his career. Other notable examples include Sueno y Mentira de Franco and La Femme qui Pleure, I, (Bloch 1333), one of his two most expensive prints, as well as the other prints of the Femme qui Pleure series.

Stylistically, Combat in the Arena represents a further departure from the more realistic neoclassical rendering of at least the majority of the Vollard Suite images, primarily insofar as its male portraiture is concerned. The women underwent various forms of delightful facial disfigurement and even one total corporeal dissolution and reassembly out of spare household parts (see Bloch 187 in this catalogue). In Combat in the Arena, all three combatants are depicted with both eyes to one side of the face and both nostrils to one side of the nose in a style typical of many of Picasso paintings but not of any of his prior prints.

To me, Combat in the Arena and the Minotauromachie, both large prints, much larger than any of the Vollards, represent the pinnacle of the Vollard Suite, though they’re not included within it, along with proper Suite pieces such as Minotaure Aveugle Guidée pars une Fillette dans la Nuit (you may have one or two other favorites, such as Minotaure Caressant une Dormeuse and Faun Dévoilant une Femme--I also favor Minotaure, Buveur et Femmes, but that's just me). Not all share this opinion. To wit, if you’ve come this far in this text, my guess is that you’re sporting a Y chromosome. Le Combat is a hard sell. The prices it commands are not at all commensurate with its beauty or its significance. My wife won’t even let me hang it, except in my home office (which, by the by, is just fine with me). Yet one dealer I know won’t part with his impression of this print unless someone were to pry his cold, dead fingers off of it, and I feel just about the same. Why am I posting this print then, you ask? For the opportunity to rant, I suppose, but also because I have now snapped up a second impression of this masterpiece.

It is noteworthy that Combat is printed on a double sheet of the same paper that was used for The Vollard Suite--these sheets of paper were divided in half for The Suite. Not so for Combat, which therefore sports the Vollard watermark on one side of the sheet and the Picasso watermark on the other.

I could wax eloquent—well, wax, anyway—about Picasso’s shockingly beautiful depictions of these men and beast (their sensitive eyes, their sensual lips, for example), but to what avail? Those of you--precious few, I’ve gathered--to whom the beauty is immediately apparent, wouldn’t need convincing. The rest of you, I have learned, are well beyond my admittedly limited powers of persuasion. And that goes equally for my friends, my wife, and my two-year-old, all of whom I regularly poll, as well as our clients. So I guess I should spare you all. In any event, that’s what makes those proverbial, if not Roman, horse races, isn’t it?