Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s

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Previous studies of Picasso\'s involvement with the classical have tendedto concentrate on the period immediately following the First World War, and toattribute that involvement to both the rise of political conservatism in France andthe domesticating influence of the artist\'s marriage to Olga Koklova. Focusinginstead on the later, classicizing prints of the 1930s, this book offers a radicallydifferent view of Picasso and the \"classical\" -- a view that aligns his work muchmore closely with Surrealist, and specifically Bataillean, revisions ofantiquity.The book\'s argument is built around detailed analyses of several separateprint series: Picasso\'s illustrations for Ovid\'s Metamorphoses, the etchings of theVollard Suite, and The Minotauromachy. Common to all of them, the book shows, is astrong engagement not only with the classical, but with the viewer. In the latter, Picasso\'s prints are clearly at odds with the understanding of the relationshipbetween classical art and its audience that prevailed throughout most of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries -- an understanding that held the work\'spurported autonomy to mirror the viewer\'s own. By exposing that autonomy as afantasy, Picasso opens the \"classical\" work and its viewer alike to theentanglements of desire and the dissolution of boundaries it inevitably brings.Muchof the argument turns on close readings of key Surrealist texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois. Even more important, however, are the prints\'numerous references, heretofore unnoticed, to specific works by, among others, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Goya. These references effectively create an alternative\"classical\" tradition out of which Picasso\'s etchings can be seen to haveemerged.