“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” Picasso asked Francoise Gilot, talking about the Vollard Suite, “That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe it’s Balzac; I’m not sure. It’s a compromise, I suppose. It doesn’t really matter. They’re only two of the people to haunt me. Every human being is a whole colony.” The retinue of characters and creatures of the Vollard Suite haunt the artist, they are the ghost of a tragedy that unfolds through pages of prints. They are the most intimate and personal aspects of Picasso's life — in particular, “the luminous dream of youth, always in the background but always within reach,” named Marie-Thérèse Walter — enacted by figures of myth and history. Every character of Picasso’s series airs an intermingling of personal and poetical elements, and expresses through fantasy, intense anger and strain, love and pleasure, aporia and self-absorption, an irresolute conflict that neither reality nor the imagination are capable of satisfying.

There are images of women seated at a bath, lying in front of curtains and crowned by flowers, recalling themes of ideal ancient beauty and of the luxurious romantic harem. But they also appear as studies made from the model as she is resting before or after a painting session, pensive, exhausted, self-possessed, or arranging her crown and makeup in order to start all over again. [Fig. 1-4] They are actresses in the artist studio; young girls whose labors make flesh and fantasy touch.

One of them is of an observant and contemplative nature. We find her again alongside a resting model, given to the survey of sensuous sleep, [Fig. 5] or with another girl, turbanned in the studio, under the lecherous eye of old bulbous-nosed Rembrandt. [Fig. 6-7] She possesses a special sensibility. When she enters the sculptor’s studio, she observes with pleasure her own features in the stone — she contemplates, admires, wonders at the power the artwork holds for her mind. [Fig 8-9] She is dedicated to those inexplicable qualities in ways that others aren’t — and wants to become better than them, she studies their postures; admires their concentration. [Fig.10]

There’s also him. A young artist, ambitious and hardworking. [Fig. 11] He wants to leave his soul in the sculpture — the very flower that crowns his youth and inspiration blends into the marble. To create what is most beautiful and the deepest expression of his self, that reflects his ambition and originality. He works hard, he reflects, he struggles, he becomes one with the piece. [Fig. 12] He learns and grows; his slender young body is now invested with the head of a mature man of experience. [Fig. 13] But he perceives his oeuvre with doubt. [Fig. 14] There’s an achievement, certainty, but he is also unsure. There is something that keeps him unsatisfied; there is always something that remains unfinished, inexact, left to be done. 

A young artist wants to learn from the old, and knows how to entice wisdom to pour over drinks. [Fig. 15] The older painter is a man of ideas, for whom character, sentiments and the world exist with a certainty and solidity. His imagination is as present and familiar for him as any other element of reality; things hover around the room as they do in his mind. [Fig. 16] He is a creature of strange monsters and tortured characters that defy the imagination and reflect his increasingly tenuous grasp of what is real. [Fig. 17] Or has he unlocked reality in such a way to see right through its impoverished facade, and with an inevitable eye recognized the kinship of soul and matter, understanding and reverie? As we have seen before, he could be a lecherous old man guided by perturbed desires, but also a firm, vital force from which others might learn to create subtle beauty.

Picasso’s artists do not always know what they want. As he said to Gilot:

The painters are a little out of contact with reality. Look at this one: someone brings him a girl and what does he draw? A line. He's a nonfigurative. The sculptor’s a little mixed up, too. If you note all the different shapes, sizes and colors of models he works from, you can understand his confusion. He doesn’t know what he wants. No wonder his style is so ambiguous. He just keeps on trying things. First he works from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he is lying around caressing his models. 

A nude Zeus-like sculptor is at work in a softly silhouetted marble. [Fig. 19] This piece is headless and crouching like a late Matisse paper cut-out against a roughly sketched sky, giving us a sensation of depth and movement. The artist’s hands and posture, in contrast, are serene and delineated in a more strictly horizontal and vertical manner, and he is portrayed larger than life, overflowing the room. At the other end of the composition, the model is holding a contrapposto, her right leg slightly back, her arm lifted to her shoulders (as Michelangelo’s David). She is as restrained and composed as the artist; the two are engrossed in that intense self-absorption and concentration required by their efforts. But, in contrast to him, she is described with a wild intensity — an efflorescence of spontaneous hatchings, shadings, patterns and luminous contrasts. The artist, the artwork and the model seem to exist in different universes; they each recall and set in opposition distinct ideas and feelings. The modern artist is imagined with the qualities of an ancient sculptor, a bearer of tradition and craft, preoccupied with the exercise of his own labors (he doesn’t look at her, but at the marble), as well as receiving inspiration from what he sees (her). The artwork is, unlike a work of antiquity, complete in its own fragmentariness; standing firm and self-contained in its momentous beauty against the chaos of nature. Finally, she is both a work of art and a person, an impression in the mind and a real woman; a numen mixum occupying a space outside and inside of the room and transfigured by the imagination of a Rembrandt-like sensibility.

When the Neoclassical sculptor and draftsman John Flaxman recovered this style of simple contours and minimal interior details at the turn of the 19th century, he was stimulated by a spirit of revival seeking to recreate the “authentic” look of antique objects and a moral impulse for “purity,” “simplicity,” and “uprightness” the new city-dwellers that sought to oppose what was seen at the time as the corrupt social circles of the courts and its official, late Rococo manners. A few decades later, Ingres took on linear drawing as a protest, not against Rococo, but against the new “romantics,” against their colorism and their distorted, violently merging bodies. Ingres’s taste for antiquity recalls the importance of tradition over experience, of training by copying classical sculpture over the artist’s impressions of nature, and of inherited craft and “talent” over the imagination of the individual artist. A similar search stimulated Picasso — leaving the problem of “tradition” aside. About the attitude of his sculptor in the Vollard Suite, absorbed in the definition of his model in a few slender lines, he once said, “He’s got a very serene look in his face, hasn’t he? When he succeeds in doing something with one pure line, he’s sure then that he’s found something.” For the recovery of the style of the Greeks expressed for him a wish for stable and universal values in a world that passes by, not as a mere reaction against the ephemeral, but rather guided by a search for real “meaning,” a desire to reach out to and express profound and shared sentiments and ideas, as opposed to modernity, where experience is perceived as empty, meaningless and fleeting. In the three-way relationship between art, model and artist, the values of “serenity” and “purity” of this style are thematized. They are recalled and unearthed from the past alongside other values (like pleasure, composure, eroticism, absorption) all of which enrich and deepen these new experiences through their innumerable resonances with the memory of the past. The ancient art of the Greeks is filtered and absorbed by a romantic sensibility that has come into consciousness of its infinite potential. The vast and conflicting feelings that prey upon the artist’s heart tear the past away from its historical moment, liberating it from the limitations of those customs and traditions that gave them value and making them material for the appropriation by artistic labor. And that is the case also for Rembrandt, Goya, and any other style that the artist lingers upon. That is the artist's obsession, Picasso and his invention’s: to paint like those ghosts from the past that haunt them, while remaining faithful to their own fleeting experience, to the sentiments, intrigues and passions that arise in the confrontation of their own life and the uniqueness of the model.

In Picasso too, the world of the studio is a small society; but no longer one where learning, creation, and labor are so easily distinguished. Learning happens communally and after the fact — we have already seen the painter’s relationship with old Rembrandt, and he is also very keen to invite his friends, bring them together to discuss and meditate on his new experiments. [Fig. 20-21] But none of them will ever create together. There are no images of the artist and his apprentices. Rather, like Rembrandt in his etching The Artist Drawing from his Model (c. 1639), the solitary artist observes the model under the aegis of past work (his and others) and nature, that mirror onto each other. For Picasso, older artworks remain an indirect source of inspiration, thrown to the side, only helping to support the “mirror of nature.” [Fig. 22] His eyes are on her, the center of all his power, the origin and end of the work of art. Instead of the imagination and the real world encountering their resolution in the inspired artwork, as they do for Rembrandt, art and life flutter in-between, in the mind of the artist and the body of the model, foundered and in tension, perhaps in hope that art will make life more beautiful, more worth living and loving; perhaps in hope that life will disperse the artworks’ insipidness, lack of meaning, and proffer to it a renewed reason to exist beyond loitering, alone and forgotten, in a room. [Fig. 23]

The more the artist and model work together in Picasso’s studio, this is exactly what happens. The model helps him reconcile with the artwork, calm his doubts and fears. [Fig. 24] There is something in the artwork that she understands, while he doesn’t. She sees herself in them and something more. [Fig. 25] She learns: she studies them and studies herself. [Fig. 26-27] She desires to become the work, imitates its poses and attitudes. [Fig. 28] She becomes one with her own image, [Fig. 29] and lives transformed by it. [Fig. 30-31] For him, she is the artwork, inextricable from the image in his mind: a sylvan faun-like creature [Fig. 32], a majestic chiaroscuro. [Fig. 33] His fantasy makes her what he thinks. Only her beauty allows him to make that which he desires, to become an artist and be granted the inspiration and dreams of art in reality, perhaps even better than he ever thought possible. In the beauty of the work, she in turn becomes better, or at least different, than who she really is. In his feelings presented in stone, she sees herself in ways she never expected; she loves him for that. [Fig. 34] Her own image shows that admiration for the ideal beauty he has shown her to be present in her soul. The artwork is at the center of their love, their feelings and desires for each other exist in it, and only art will let them reach the loftiest heights of happiness as well as the most tortuous suffering, the chaotic depths of jealousy and pain.

Their encounter in the studio changes their relationship towards art and life. Their life becomes a masquerade, an artistic occasion both for celebration and self-forgetfulness. [Fig. 35-36] These two images of art entering life cannot be more opposed. In the one, they are characters of the permitted social costumes and civilized high society: players, perhaps lackeys, seeing from afar their perfect dream granted to society. In the other, they are drunk and, in their minds, have become Greek adorers of Dionysus; the woman holding to her face the mask of the sculptor; he, the Minotaur; a third figure raising a cup in homage to a Mediterranean siren. They remind us of “the tremendous conflict between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the Dionysian art of music,” that Nietzsche talks about. For if the Apollonian pleasure is that of perceiving ourselves and our imagination as separate, detached free-playing forces, encountered from a distance with the glorious wisdom of an invigorated self; Dionysian is the delight of losing oneself, the joy of self-forgetfulness in communion, where all necessity, custom and tradition, breaks apart, and one becomes fused with everything around us in the mystery of a primordial unity. “Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him [the participant]; he feels himself a god, he himself now walks enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in dreams.”

The introduction of life into art also presents many different ways of creation. Their relationship ceases to be platonic. Their erotic longing is fulfilled in the same studio where their shared hopes and aspirations have crystallized. This brings them to happiness, to the highest peak of their creative production and love. In their creations, there are little beings that serve as instances of higher ideals: drink and war. [Fig. 37] The dagger that brings death: the dagger of bravery and heroism. With it, he battles, overcomes challenges, and destroys monsters. He maintains order, peace, and happiness. The drink is not the Dionysian reverie, but the celebratory pleasure of a worthy life, elegance, and sobriety. He also encounters her and his own likeness realized with a touch of perfection and satisfying sentiment. [Fig. 38-41] He exhibits also the opposite; distorted shapes and curving geometries that represent not so much her exterior figure as the breakdown of her body; a surrealist mutilation of her appearance in order to mirror what is inside — a body that has undergone a painful transformation. [Fig. 42] He presents her with a forest of symbols of his creativity, the spontaneous ability to create that she has gifted him. Thus, we see circuses and saltimbanquis, [Fig. 43-44] which from Picasso’s youth have been a theme for meditation on art as a free and playful act. One of these players is presented in another print alongside a horse, suavely reaching down to take his whip and almost merging with it at the level of the hips. [Fig. 45] The horses appear once and again, some performing a fight or a sexual contest [Fig. 46]; others as part of a bullfight scene with a bull penetrating their sides, and stepping over their vanquished bodies. [Fig. 47-48] In a sketch Picasso made immediately after the Vollard Suite (for Guernica), we are given an insight into the horse’s identity. From a wound at the side of the dying animal springs another little horse with wings: it is Pegasus, the winged horse that emerges from Medusa’s body when she is slayed by Perseus. Perseus is able to slay Medusa by turning away his gaze or looking through a mirror or a shining bronze shield. By looking at an image of reality, and not at reality directly, he is able to control her monstrous nature. Pegasus is a metamorphosis of Medusa; the liberated energy of the destroyed creature. The flying horse ascends to Mount Helicon, the sacred site of the Muses and from the spot where his hoof stamps issues a nurturing spring.

Pegasus is not the only mythical figure that Picasso uses to express himself in the Vollard Suite. There’s a depiction of a centaur and woman ardently kissing in a way that subtly recalls Rodin’s popular sculptureThe Kiss (1882), but more passionate and eroticized. [Fig. 49] This image inverts the iconography of the battle between the Lapith women and the Centaurs in the temple of Zeus, from which Picasso derives the centaur’s posture and facial features. The female figure is most certainly a memory of the uncontrolled eroticism of Ingres’ female characters, like his Jupiter and Thetis (1811) and his Angelica (1819). In this inversion, the mythical creature is no longer a source of fear and violence; the imagination and the real are reconciled, joyful in their passion. Their kiss is the ultimate reflection of what the couple lying at the side, the artist and the model, might dream to achieve — the sexual resolution of their different natures, their collapse into each other's bodies, a promise of ecstasy, pleasure, and eternal love.

The five scenes of violent and ferocious copulation that are euphemistically called today the Battle of Love are in fact inspired by this dream to merge their bodies, to interlock their forms, into a single sculptural mass of violent sentiments. The surface of the prints almost explode in the paroxysm of abstract swirling lines and torn surfaces — Picasso forcefully outlines the bodies as if to keep them with great effort from disintegrating into each other. [Fig. 50-55] That there is no coherence between the figures and the space they occupy, between the world and their bodies, would be to say little — only with exertion one differentiates which members belong to who. They look away from each other, but in fact their eyes are sightless, their minds do not perceive anything but their own fervor. The importance of individuals fades besides the enormous significance of their pleasure. If the body in other prints is a monument to beauty and perfection, to power, intellect, and youth, here it is bestial and barbarous — a cry for the extinction of all that is earthly, physical, and sensual, in the convulsive throes of intoxication.

But this physical reconciliation was not available for them in reality. Life continues and breaks apart the illusions of their over-romanticized happiness. It brings their fears and doubts into play; it makes their anxieties palpable. There was always the artwork between them, infinite, intricate, inexhaustible, calling into being their union, but also opening the box of Pandora’s evils. Both dreamed to love each other purely, to be faithful in good and in bad times, in sickness and in health, and honor all the days of their life in eternal music. [Fig. 56-57] But purity for them doesn’t last. The artwork began to startle them. [Fig. 58] A disruption occurred, as if from paradise their unity has been threatened. He seems to slip sometimes from her away into his own artistic dream, in love with the illusion rather than her own body. [Fig. 59] She is jealous, because she loves him, and she notices that he might not love her back; he might only love that which she’s not, her image in his imagination. [Fig. 60] She becomes anxious, tortured by her own image. [Fig. 61] What does an image like this one [Fig. 62] mean? Are we in her tortured mind? Is she afraid that he is going to share her with others? That they will come to contemplate her because she is only part of his artwork, the muse, an object of beauty and not of love?

What the artist thinks of this is almost inscrutable. It offers us some of the most overwhelming and difficult images of the whole series. It all happens at the level of dreams, in his mind, which intermittently combines the extremes of brutal passion and tenderness under obscure and complex symbols. Here we enter the world of Picasso’s Minotaur. The mythological creatures that he uses are elements of his deepest conflicts, fears, inhibitions, and passions presented with the breath of life and thus transformed into living beings. 

The Minotaur is an error, a creature that should not have existed, the product of an abominable punishment by the gods. King Minos of Crete, the son of Zeus and Europa, insulted Poseidon by keeping a present of the most beautiful white bull promised to the god as sacrifice. The furious Poseidon punished him by making his wife, Pasiphae, fall so desperately in love with the bull that she had the architect Daedalus craft a hollow wooden cow to mate with the animal. The Minotaur, the shameful offspring of this misalliance, was then condemned to wander aimlessly in a labyrinth for the rest of his life, isolated from the world and condemned to feed on the tender blood of hopeful youth. “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up in a line, it might represent a Minotaur,” said Picasso to Romuald Dor de la Souchère. And the artist in the series does in fact believe the same. The incertitude of his efforts, the apparent meaninglessness and impossibility of his aims portray the face of the monster. In this face he sees his own homelessness, the happiness that he cannot achieve, neither in love nor in art, because inside him it stirs a demon that transforms everything he has ever been able to possess, not into gold, but into thin air. He is condemned by this monstrous voice inside him to reject with disgust every day what would please anyone else and strive once and again, melancholic and exhausted, for more, for the new and for the different. 

“All this takes place on a hilly island in the Mediterranean. Like Crete,” said Picasso to Gilot, “That’s where the minotaurs live, along the coast. They’re the rich seigneurs of the island. They know they’re monsters and they live, like dandies and dilettantes everywhere, the kind of existence that reeks of decadence in houses filled with works of art by the most fashionable painters and sculptors. They love being surrounded by pretty women.” In this labyrinth of riches, the Minotaur gives himself to the poor pleasures that he loves. “They get the local fishermen to go out and round up girls from the neighboring islands. After the heat of the day has passed, they bring in the sculptors and their models for parties, with music and dancing, and everybody gorges himself on mussels and champagne until melancholy fades away and euphoria takes over.” These are orgies where the pleasures of intoxication and sex are combined with the luxury of broken conventions and irresponsibility. [Fig. 63-64] There are glimpses of exhaustion in their faces, of intellectual intrigue and discourse. He is no longer condemned to the qualities of a single woman, to his uncertain love. Or is it rather that she is now able to transform herself into every woman he has ever loved, into a perfect incarnation of his past, present, and future dreams? The Minotaur enjoys the gratification of privacy, no longer tainted by art. Here, there’s only the intimate connection between two people in love. She fulfills all his expectations, perhaps even anticipates and surpasses what he imagines: both a being of intellect and taste [Fig. 65] and a connoisseur of physical delight. [Fig. 66]

But only “until melancholy fades away.” The uncertainty of the Minotaur is inexhaustible. He doesn’t know what he wants, he can’t know; and sisyphean, he is condemned to suffer for that for the rest of eternity. “A minotaur can’t be loved for himself. At least he doesn’t think he can. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to him, somehow. Perhaps that’s why he goes in for orgies.” The Minotaur cannot be loved. He knows he is an abomination, that nobody can but be terrorized at his chimera-like ever-changing nature, his bestial character, his age, his eccentricity, his features, his restlessness. [Fig. 67] Isn’t there the sense in the women, at the height of the orgies, of a kind of soullessness, a certain terror and regret? [Fig. 68] That is why he is afraid of his bestial thirst, to give way, to freely show her the extremities of his own impulses. [Fig. 69] He is afraid, but he also desires to attack her with his desirous, youthful, vigorous soul; of making her prey for his indomitable instincts. [Fig. 70] Will she be terror-stricken? What does she think when she gazes at him sleeping after a night of love, after what for him might have been the greatest of happiness? [Fig. 71] He looks at her with his beautiful boyish eyes, the light at the window illuminating her body and his mind. [v. 26] He looks at her under the brightness of day, half-goat, half-man, a faun. [Fig. 72] But in contrast with the innumerable images that make this a theme one of undue lust (Poussin or Watteau), the faun here steps back with a face of tenderness; he reaches timidly; he doesn’t want to possess but only to graze with the top of his fingers the silhouette of her body, the sweetness of her smooth skin. He might as well be afraid of interrupting her sleep. But for the Minotaur neither possession nor contemplation, neither love nor violence, are excluded from each other; both are inextricable sentiments felt at every instance. They give each other their incomparable intensity; for him they together create love, ever-changing love. He knows that his incapacity to soothe his nature with something less — to coerce his soul into something more conventional, more “natural” — constitutes his doom, and hers. Again, Picasso: “He’s studying her, trying to read her thoughts, trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster. It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her.”

“A minotaur keeps his women lavishly but he reigns by terror and they’re glad to see him killed.” “We’re taught that Theseus came and killed a minotaur but he was only one of many. It happened every Sunday: a young Attic Greek came over from the mainland and when he killed a minotaur he made all the women happy, especially the old ones.” [Fig. 73-74] The sacrifice of the Minotaur for the artist is the necessary sacrifice of all his hopes. The world stares at him, furious, envious, lovingly, with compassion. Most are indifferent, some merely curious, and a few stretch their hands to offer him final solace or to push the dagger deeper into his heart. He wishes them to know that he was condemned, like all of them, to roam his life blindly. [Fig. 75-76] He knew not what direction to take; he was unsure of every step he pursued. He knows he is monstrous, but is it his fault? The men from the ships, that antique image of valiant searchers and heroic explorers, look at him in awe. They recognize in his struggle a flame of what they once wished but were too afraid to work after. Everlasting youth thronged with passion; a life where each and every one of its moments overflows meaning; eternal presence, fertile, new; that doesn't succumb to dissatisfaction, doesn’t yearn, but lives.

The artist longed to make good on the promise that “beauty resolves the conflict of natures—or at least aims at resolving it—in the intricate totality of society.” But where the “totality of society” has failed, there reigned indecision, confusion and chaos; the artist’s studio became a world charged with undermined erotic feelings, and where the distinctions between the aesthetic work of art and the aesthetic way of passively beholding the world became too anxiously blurred or too rigidly established. The Minotaur, like some inebriated god, plucked those corrupt and loving flowers, shining into them the potential of their irresolution. He is both accomplished happiness and unleashed nihilism. Thus, he became the object of sacrifice. But whereas in ancient tragedies, the catastrophe often worked as a reconciliation of human impotence with the caprice of the Gods and the omnipotence of fate, the vision of the Minotaur is posed as a unresolved riddle: not a choice but a wrenching burden, both in the stasis of death and the empty dynamism of eternal wandering. Nietzsche used to say that at the origin of Apollonian art, that art whose essence is the ideal images of everyday experience transfigured by the life of heroes and Gods, lay the secret consciousness the ancients had of the absurdity of existence — the voice of Silenus reminding them that the best and most desirable of all things for man was “not to be born, to be nothing,” and the second best, “to die soon.” And to endure this pain and terror, the Greek interposed between himself and life the radiant illusion of art, whose perfect forms inspire him with the desire for life. The modern artist is unsure that his means are capable of the kind of consciousness he means to assert, nor of the world’s capacity to handle the desires it produces. And yet, he still tries to sow, like those ancient masters, in the ear-deafening dissonance within the world and consciousness, the secret of the Minotaur, his grain of longing and desire.

When Picasso began to produce the Vollard Suite he was in his mid-sixties. He had just met Marie-Thérèse Walter, a beautiful woman of seventeen, on the street one day, and he fell in love. Even many years later, he thought of her. “She became the luminous dream of youth, always in the background but always within reach, that nourished his work,” Francoise Gilot, a later lover of the artist, described her. He was married, however, to Olga Khokhlova, a well-born young woman of high social status. Olga met Picasso when he became associated with a new circle of collectors and critics beyond the purview of his early friendships in the bohemia of Paris. She attracted him at the time as an effective partner in a social stratum a great deal higher than he had occupied until then; Picasso might had in fact expected to continue living with her like he did before, a bohemian, only in a grander manner. But Olga’s own social ambitions and her desires to live le high-life, as the French called it, increasingly made demands that Picasso was unwilling to fulfill. To have a nurse, a cook and a chambermaid; to spend his summer in Monte Carlo and Juan-les-Pins; to be often in the company of high society—among constant quarrels, their lives became increasingly unbearable, and by 1930 both wanted a divorce. “According to Pablo,” Gilot tells us, “Olga didn’t have the sacred fire of art,” and it must be fair to assume that Picasso desired Marie-Thérèse because she did—at least for the time being. After some hustle and bustle, Picasso obtained the divorce when Olga learned that Marie-Thérèse was pregnant. But by that time the honeymoon of love had passed away, at least for him. By the time Picasso sent his last print to Vollard, Dora Maar had entered his life.

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