The Blind Minotaur Led by a Little Girl
Artist
Pablo Picasso
(Spanish, 1881–1973)
Date1934
Mediumetching and aquatint on cream laid paper
Dimensionssheet: 34.5 × 44.5 cm (13 9/16 × 17 1/2 in.)
ClassificationsPrints
Credit LineMuseum Purchase
Object number1954.57
Label TextIn the 1930s, having emerged from a neoclassical phase, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso explored one of the Surrealists’ chief influences—the unconscious. A recurrent subject in Picasso’s work during this period is the Minotaur—a half-human, half-bull monster first described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
In Ovid’s tale, fourteen Athenian youths were sacrificed every seven years to satisfy the cannibalistic Minotaur. However, in Picasso’s etching, a young women bearing likeness to his seventeen-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, leads a helpless, blind beast on a leash. Picasso transforms Ovid’s vicious Minotaur into a tragic creature who serves as a metaphor for the artist’s reliance on a muse.
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