With the Pamplona Bull Run less than a fortnight away, this week’s picture choice is a series of evocative sketches of bulls and bullfighters created by Pablo Picasso in his vigorous old age. All done in the same notebook and on the same day, 3 April 1959, they amount to a kind of tauromachic comic strip and are among the artist’s last reflections on a subject which had preoccupied him since the start of his career.
 
Picasso was born in Malaga in Andalusia, where the tradition of the bullfight is especially deep rooted. His own aficion for the bulls and those who fought them was a legacy from his father, who initiated him into the thrill and the horror of the corrida almost as soon as he could walk. John Richardson quotes him extensively on the subject in the first volume of his Life of Picasso:

“I must have been ten years old when my father took me to see El Lagartijo fight. I remember his hair was white, snow white. In those days bullfighters didn’t retire so young as they do now. Well, the bulls were different then, too, huge – and they charged the horses as much as twenty times. And the horses dropped like flies, their guts everywhere. Horrible! Those days were different, and so was the bullfight …”

“I also knew Cara Ancha, even if I never saw him fight. I was very young and my father, a great aficionado, took me to his hotel room in Malaga, either before or after the bullfight… It’s one of my most vivid childhood recollections. I was on his lap looking at him, overwhelmed…”

“In the Plaza de Pontevedra, my friends and I organised our own bullfights. I used to teach the other boys how to handle...

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