Pablo Picasso met the young Marie-Thérèse Walter by chance one day in 1927: “I knew nothing— either of life or of Picasso… I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together’” (Marie-Thérèse quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women, 1994, p. 143).
Her introduction serves as an apt prelude to a woman whose influence within Picasso’s life was reciprocal, as she both shaped and was shaped by the rich mythological narratives that permeated Picasso’s prolific output throughout the 1930s. Picasso's fervent passion for his youthful muse remained undiminished from the t.mes of their meeting, as evidenced by the impassioned vision offered in L'Enlèvement, executed six years later. This piece stands as a pinnacle of narrative prowess, pictorial drama, and the masterful emotional distention of the human form, encapsulating the personal tensions and groundbreaking stylistic evolution that characterizes one of the most celebrated periods in Picasso’s illustrious career.
The summers of 1927 and 1928 were spent at the beach in Cannes and Dinard, respectively. These periods proved remarkably fruitful for Picasso’s artmaking, as the clandestine presence of the young Marie-Thérèse added an erotic frisson to seaside activities and a counterpoint to his deteriorating relationship with his wife Olga Khokhlova. As a subject and a muse, the young Marie-Thérèse, with her soft blonde hair, fair skin and blue eyes, perpetually occupied the role of the ingénue within Picasso’s oeuvre. At the same t.mes , she offered Picasso with a kind of artistic catharsis, as in his representation of her he began to break down the human form to its barest essentials, an amalgamation of shapes which echoed the curves and bones of the human body. It is in these visions of the biomorphic, lilac-skinned Walters that her representation in L'Enlèvement begins to find its precedent (see fig. 1). In the summer of 1928 and later in 1932, Walters endured two consecutive near-death encounters at sea, events that served as the basis for what would develop into Picasso’s mythic lore between his lover and the ocean.
Picasso’s fascination with antiquity took root at a young age and only grew in intensity during his years of academic training in Spain, much of which was spent copying works of Greek and Roman sculpture. As he developed artistically, so too did his relational approach to ancient subject matter. Replication soon gave way to creative reinterpretation, and in 1920, Picasso made his first attempt at translating a specific subject from classical mythology into his own artistic idiom (see fig. 2). As test.mes nt to the significance of the present composition, this first series of drawings also took the story of Nessus and Deianira as their subject. In 1920, as in 1933, Picasso chose to depict the moment of climax within the myth. Recounted in the ninth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the tale revolves around the abduction of Deinara, Hercules’ bride, by the centaur Nessus. As depicted in L'Enlèvement, Nessus, who had promised to ferry her across the river Euenos, attempts to assault Deianira during their journey. His attempt is thwarted by a poison arrow shot by Hercules, who observes the scene from the riverbank, just before the act is consummated.
Close examination of the two works in succession reveals the cathartic power and profound emotional intensity this classical subject had come to bear for Picasso when revisiting the theme thirteen years later. Compared with the measured, almost academic demeanor of the 1920 iteration, still under the influence of his early neoclassical style, the voracious linework in L'Enlèvement is rendered with a ferocity and passion that speaks to an altogether embodied mode of execution.
Picasso’s interest in classical themes was broadly shared in the 1930s; in fact, the ancient Greek myth of the Minotaur witnessed a revival in popularity at the t.mes , likely in debt to Sir Arthur Evans’ publication of six volumes on the discovery and excavations of the Palace of Knossos on Crete. The lore begins when King Minos of Crete angers Poseidon by failing to sacrifice a promised bull. In retaliation, Poseidon cursed Minos' queen, Pasiphae, causing her to fall deeply in love with the bull. To fulfill her passion, she enlisted the architect Daedalus to construct a hollow wooden cow. From their union, the Minotaur—half man, half beast—was born. To conceal his queen’s trespassing, Minos ordered Daedalus to build a labyrinth as a refuge for the creature, where each year he received seven young men and women from Crete as fodder for his monstrous appetite. This continued until the young Theseus valiantly entered the labyrinth to defeat the beast.
Amid a new wave of classicism, Theseus' fight against the Minotaur came to be seen by artists and writers in the 1930s as representative of the persistence of Mediterranean values in the face of rising Fascist and communist dictatorships. Meanwhile, the Surrealists extracted from the hedonism of the Minotaur in his labyrinth a force against reason that justified indulgence in their innermost urges, especially their desire for transgression and sexual liberation.
So inspired by the symbolic potency of the character, avant-garde titans Albert Skira, André Breton and Pierre Maillebe began to publish the eponymous Minotaure, a magazine dedicated to art, theory and the Surrealist spirit, commissioning Picasso to design the cover of the first issue (see fig. 3). Despite the political underpinnings of the Surrealist’s appropriation of the myth, Picasso’s design for the cover emphasizes the beast's private and sexual context, and most importantly its part human, part animal nature. It was precisely in this nexus that Picasso began to formulate the close identification with the character-type that comes to be thematized in the Suite Vollard, and which ultimately finds its most impassioned expression in L'Enlèvement.
At the commission of the famed art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, Picasso executed a series of 100 etchings which would come to be celebrated as the most accomplished of his career. Uninterested in merely illustrating the ancient myth, Picasso instead gave the story personal interpretations, much like an intimate diary of his life, his passions and his tribulations.
The Vollard Suite
Picasso opens the series with a suite of forty etchings relating to the theme of “The Sculptor’s Studio.” In these works, Picasso revives all of the paradigms of representation he had established for Marie-Thérèse thus far: she appears invariably as the muse, the model, the sculpture and the biomorphic figure. As the Minotaur began to appear with increasing frequency within Picasso’s oeuvre, so too was Marie-Thérèse's role transformed into that of the victim of the beast's pursuit and exploit. It is also with these etchings that we see the most explicit stylistic precedent for the violence with which the present work is wrought.
In L'Enlèvement, their two bodies are made indecipherable by the all consuming gesture of the namesake abduction, only distinguished by the contrasting tones of the watercolor wash, which likewise lends itself to a distinctly Mediterranean romanticism. Rapture becomes indecipherable from restraint, just as passion does from violence. The opposing emotional forces communicated in the momentary, albeit coerced union of the two figures can undoubtedly be read as an allusion to the inner turmoil brought on as his relationship with Olga and Marie-Therese came to its apogee—both in terms of the frustration brought on by one woman and the liberation promised by the other.
In his use of the Minotaur as an alter-ego, Picasso finds acute precedent in the work of Auguste Rodin, whose sculpted vision of a different moment from the myth of the Minotaur has likewise come to be read as self-portrait (see fig. 4). Beyond Picasso’s identification with the dual nature of the Minotaur himself, his self-representation within the Suite as both the Minotaur and the sculptor adds a poignant dimensionality to his introspection that is likewise felt in the present work. In also depicting himself as the sculptor, doubtless an allusion to Daedalus, Picasso thus assumes the guise of the architect of the beast and the beast himself.
In its primitive expression of eroticism, and its embrace of iconography, mythology and narrative, L'Enlèvement stands as a remarkable precursor to Neo-Expressionism, a movement which would come to crystallize in the 1980s. In reaction to what they perceived as the lofty, hyper-intellectualized ethos of the later strains of abstraction, Neo-Expressionists returned to the human body as their central communicative idiom. There is at present a particularly striking parallel with the work of Georg Baselitz, often credited as the father of the movement. In depicting his figures upside down, Baselitz enacts a forceful ellison of physical orientation and psychological state. Posture and figuration here become expressive signifiers, laden with a visceral emotional weight that comes to be felt as the distended figures come into focus (see fig. 5).
As myth is sublimated with reality, and reality with myth, so too is the painted body sublimated with the real, and the real with the painted. As the human figure is literally disfigured by the intensity of the sexual and emotional experience being described, the overwhelming feeling upon looking at the work becomes one of abjection. The viewer is at once removed from and instantiated within the scene, and so begins to experience the same duality that Picasso relates to in the Minotaur. Through his primal reinterpretation of ancient motifs and intimate engagement with personal passion, Picasso solidifies his status as a transformative figure in the annals of modern art.