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拍品专文
The following three impressions from Picasso’s famous sequence of lithographs Le Taureau (lots 937-939) are a remarkable record of the artist’s creative process, documenting, like stills from a motion picture reel by Eadweard Muybridge, the gradual progress of Picasso’s deconstruction of the animal. Executed on a single slab of limestone, the traditional material for lithography, Picasso worked his bull through eleven ‘states’ or stages. Beginning with a powerful specimen, horned head lowered in a display of aggression, the animal is pared back in successive states through erasure and redrawing. Lithography relies on the principle of the repulsion of grease and water, with the image drawn onto the surface with oily crayons and washes and then chemically fixed with a gum arabic etch. In stone lithography changes can be made by scraping away the surface in the drawn or inked areas, re-exposing the underlying, virgin stone, for correction or revision.
There is a dichotomy between the apparent hardness of the material, and the mutability of the images that can be created and altered on its surface, and in Le Taureau Picasso pushed this potential to new creative heights. By the fifth state (lot 937) the bull’s back has been lowered and the body crisscrossed by intersecting shapes abstracting the musculature of the animal. In the sixth state (lot 938), it’s bulk has been substantially reduced, and the head, scrotum, sheath, and tail clarified and redefined, re-emphasizing an archetypal profile of a bull. In the final five states the revisions are even more radical, culminating in the eleventh state (lot 939), in which it has been reduced to the barest essentials.
Jean Célestin, a master printer at the Imprimerie Mourlot, memorably described the making of this extraordinary series:
One day he began this famous bull. A superb bull, wonderfully plump. I thought it was finished. Far from it. Second state. Third state... By the final state, only a few lines remained. I watched him work. Removing and removing. I thought back to the first bull. I couldn't help but think, what I don't understand is that he is finishing where he should have started! But he was searching for his bull. And to arrive at this bull of a single line, well, he had gone through all those other bulls! (quoted in: H. Parmelin, 'Le mur de fer de Picasso', in F. Mourlot, Picasso Lithographe, 1970, n.p. [our translation]).
Fernand Mourlot records that 18 proofs of the first ten states were printed but no editions issued; only the eleventh, final state was published in an edition of fifty impressions.
There is a dichotomy between the apparent hardness of the material, and the mutability of the images that can be created and altered on its surface, and in Le Taureau Picasso pushed this potential to new creative heights. By the fifth state (lot 937) the bull’s back has been lowered and the body crisscrossed by intersecting shapes abstracting the musculature of the animal. In the sixth state (lot 938), it’s bulk has been substantially reduced, and the head, scrotum, sheath, and tail clarified and redefined, re-emphasizing an archetypal profile of a bull. In the final five states the revisions are even more radical, culminating in the eleventh state (lot 939), in which it has been reduced to the barest essentials.
Jean Célestin, a master printer at the Imprimerie Mourlot, memorably described the making of this extraordinary series:
One day he began this famous bull. A superb bull, wonderfully plump. I thought it was finished. Far from it. Second state. Third state... By the final state, only a few lines remained. I watched him work. Removing and removing. I thought back to the first bull. I couldn't help but think, what I don't understand is that he is finishing where he should have started! But he was searching for his bull. And to arrive at this bull of a single line, well, he had gone through all those other bulls! (quoted in: H. Parmelin, 'Le mur de fer de Picasso', in F. Mourlot, Picasso Lithographe, 1970, n.p. [our translation]).
Fernand Mourlot records that 18 proofs of the first ten states were printed but no editions issued; only the eleventh, final state was published in an edition of fifty impressions.