More than a hundred exhibits, including paintings, drawings, engravings and original plates on display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art illustrate Pablo Picasso's fascination with the world of bulls. This is the Spanish Government's way of commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Spain and Israel.
Even in his childhood Pablo Ruiz Picasso would attend bullfights with his father at the bullrings of Málaga and La Coruña. Bullfighting appears in his earliest drawings, and it is significant that his first painting, dated 1892, represents a picador. From this point onwards he was attracted by all aspects connected in one way or another with the world of bulls, and fascinated by the infinite dialectic of the bullfight: the duel between the bull and bullfighter, the struggle between the bull and the horse, the play of light and shadow, the face-off between life and death.
Motifs of bullfighters, bulls, picadors and horses were common throughout his life, and mythological bulls and minotaurs also appear in his paintings, pastels, drawings and ceramics. The area, though, in which, above all from the 1930s onwards, bullfighting takes on particular importance is in his graphic work. In his mature years, after he had settled in Southern France, the attraction he felt for bullfighting and his personal friendship with a number of matadors brought him into contact with all kinds of professionals and aficionados, as a regular spectator at the bullrings in Arles, Fréjus, Nîmes and Vallauris.
In 1957 Picasso began illustrating the book Tauromaquia o arte de torear (“Tauromachy or the Art of Bullfighting”), by José Delgado, alias Pepe Illo, for the Ediciones La Cometa specialist collection. He made 26 aquatints representing different moments in the bullfight, and in accordance with its ritual orthodoxy, produced a vivid and objective depiction of each point in the combat.
