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Picasso, Matisse, Klee: the Parisian museum exhibits the major works collected by the fine German gallery owner who died in 2007, where the torments and obsessions of the painters he worked with can be read.
Picasso spelled his name wrong. In the concentrated collection of German Jewish merchant Heinz Berggruen, who died in 2007 at age 93, there is an engraving from 1935, Minotauromachy, dedicated to “my friend Bergrruen”, with two “r”s and not two “g’s”. Picasso writes words poorly, but his spelling of shapes is perfect enough for him to draw or paint whatever he wants, under tension. Minotauromachy is, according to the art historian Pierre Daix, died in 2014, “undoubtedly the most important, in any case the most complex” of his engravings. His fantasies – or his fears – are brought together at a moment that he will describe as “the worst period of [sa] vie». He is about to separate from Olga and his new partner, Marie-Thérèse Walter, is pregnant. Soon his workshop will be sequestered. A year before the Spanish Civil War, it was the Spaniard’s private war.
A large minotaur is leaning over Marie-Thérèse. The young woman is a bullfighter lying on a disemboweled horse, breasts exposed. The horse seems to announce that of Guernica. A threat of rape hangs in the air. Two other elongated models appear in the Orangerie exhibition, not far from Giaco’s infinitely vertical shadows
