毕加索 Part 05

In his Parisian exile, the modernist virtuoso finds himself haunted by a past master, the darkest genius of Spanish painting, Francisco Goya. . . . . . .

Goya was the first to make art look squarely into the nightmare of cruelty that was modern warfare. His disasters of war turn the ideal forms of art, the beauty of a human body, into a sick joke.

So much butcher's chops. . . . . . .

Goya's obsessions infected Picasso. The old master's bullfights, with their rituals of slaughter, pulling him inexorably back to Spain.

. . . . . . In 1934, Picasso crossed the Pyrenees for a tour of his homeland.

For part of the trip, he was joined by Marie Therese. Inevitably, here in Madrid, they went to a bullfight.

. . . . . . The poet Federico Lorca described Spain as the only country where death is a national spectacle.

. . . . . . In the mid-1930s, the spectacle was threatening to spill from the bullring.

. . . . . . Spain was about to be torn apart. It was already hopelessly divided.

There was a modern Spain, urban, secular, industrial. A Spain of thriving socialist movements and agitating anarchists.