What the Minotaur can tell us about Picasso

Tim Smith-Laing | Apollo | 2nd May 2017

Picasso had good reason to revere bulls – his Spanish heritage, his identification with Goya.  So the remains of Knossos, discovered in Crete around 1900, gave Picasso his alter-ego, the half man, half bull Minotaur. “It is a figure that speaks to almost everything he did, both in and out of the studio. His Minotaurs appear in scenes both of rape and of tender eroticism, as monsters and as victims and as heroes.”