Éros dans l'arène de Picasso ; entre art populaire et art contemporain

Exhibition at the Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 21 June - 21 September 2025

From his earliest childhood drawings to his last unfinished painting, Picasso's monumental oeuvre is criss-crossed by the two figures of the woman and the bull. Combined in the same plastic space, they offer numerous significant variations in his aesthetic, intimate, ideological and historical development.

However, Picasso's relationship with women and his passion for bulls are the subject of much debate today, some of it explosive. Yet an examination of these two themes reveals a Picasso who is far removed from the macho stereotypes, marked by the bloody practice of bullfighting. Far from being submissive or mistreated, the women in these paintings are not only full of compassion for the animal or shared tenderness with the bullfighter, but also powerful and sometimes dominant. As for the bull, never before in the history of art has an animal permeated an entire body of work to the point of obsession, as it does in Picasso's work.

This exhibition catalogue seeks to shed light on the man and contextualise his creations. Because they were nourished by him, Picasso's works are in dialogue with those of the popular iconography he was so fond of, those of his predecessors whom he admired, of his contemporaries whom he rubbed shoulders with, and those of contemporary artists, from Claude Viallat to Sophie Calle.