Exhibition shows Picasso`s passion for women and bulls

Berlin: A new exhibition at Berlin`s Kupferstichkabinett Museum provides visitors with a window into Spanish artist Pablo Picasso`s passion for women and bulls via 180 prints, drawings, paintings and other works.

‘Pablo Picasso: Women, Bulls and Old Masters’, which began Friday and runs until Jan 12, 2014, includes works from the museum`s holdings and others from public and private collections. "Picasso created the most important oeuvre in 20th-century art not only in his capacity as a painter and sculptor, but also and above all as a draughtsman and printmaker," the museum said in a statement posted on its website. The works in the exhibition cover seven decades of Picasso`s output, ranging from a 1900 painting to the erotic works of the 1960s. Picasso (1881-1973) was heavily influenced by the imagery of bullfighting as a Spaniard living in exile in France and because he often accompanied his father to bull rings as a boy, curator Anita Beloubek-Hammer said Thursday. "For me, the bull is the proudest animal in existence," Picasso said on one occasion. Picasso saw the minotaur - the mythical creature that was half man and half bull - as his alter ego, Beloubek-Hammer said. Bullfights symbolised the battle of the sexes for Picasso, with the man represented by the figure of the bullfighter and the woman by the bull, Beloubek-Hammer said. Women were another important theme in Picasso`s work, representing the different attitudes toward life. IANS