Picasso and Rando: meeting in the arena

The artist Jorge Rando during the opening in Malaga of the exhibition 'Encuentro en la arena.

Pablo Picasso and Jorge Rando'. Carlos Díaz (EFE)

Paul McCartney narrated long ago how his

originated from a happy meeting he and his wife Linda had with Dustin Hoffman in Jamaica.

The actor was there filming

—adaptation of Henri Charrière's autobiographical story of the same name, emblem of the fight for freedom—, while the McCartneys were taking a vacation.

It was April 1973. The

appeared on set, starting a pleasant conversation with the actor, which would continue that night at a lively dinner.

Late in the evening and accompanied by his guitar, the author of

, flaunting his creative capacity, suggested the protagonist of

to choose any news from the newspaper of the day with which he would compose a song.

Chance, the muse of history, wanted that day to coincide with the death of the Spanish genius, Pablo Picasso, news that was then going around the world.

The article chosen by the actor reported that the last words of the creator of

were: "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know that I can't drink anymore."

And that's how the

ballad was born that was going to be part of a new and successful album, the third,

, by the band that the

and Linda had formed just two years ago, Wings.

Picasso's Last Words (Drink to me)

is the music chosen to set the scene for the exhibition that, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Ruiz Picasso (born October 25, 1881 and died April 8, 1973), confronts some of the numerous bullfights by the cubist master with the only sequence on the world of bullfighting produced by the expressionist Jorge Rando (born June 23, 1941), also from Malaga.

The sample is collected in one of the most beautiful and evocative corners of Malaga, the Jorge Rando Museum, whose bright central patio —crowned by a magnificent mandarin tree— which is surrounded by the exhibition rooms, are the heart of this cultural space that, under the An exemplary direction by Vanesa Diez Barriuso, it has become a promised landscape of the Mediterranean city —to use the expression of Ortega y Gasset—.

This environment offers an incomparable framework to reflect on one of the issues that have generated the most controversy in our cultural world: the rise, decline and questioning of the world of bullfighting throughout the 20th century.

A local theme with universal projection, bulls have been a source of inspiration for the different peoples that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula, from the Argaric culture in the Bronze Age to our time.

For Picasso, a full reference of modernity, with whose cubist work all the avant-garde would dialogue, in one way or another, bullfighting is the only theme that, in fact, goes through all its stages.

Parallel to his own biography, the world of bullfighting transitioned, in just a few decades, from a period of splendor to its immediate decline.

That which had been the most national spectacle —the title of a book by Count de las Navas (1899)— then witnessed a time in which figures such as Joselito, Juan Belmonte, Guerrita —Rafael Guerra—, Lagartijo, and, a little later, Domingo Ortega or Manolete,

Since the mid-fifties in the world of bullfighting, Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez have triumphed, whose anthological rivalry created one of the most brilliant pages in the history of bullfighting.

In the following decade, Spain and the Fiesta were already others.

Developmentalism had generated a certain opening —especially economic—, which endowed the country with a dynamism that would be essential for the subsequent democratic transition after the death of the dictator.

In those final two decades of Francoism, international attention also came due to the specificity of Spain, in which not a little had to do with the works of Hispanists who, after the pioneering work by Gerald Brenan, El Laberinto español (1943), attended

appearance of a series of decisive works such as

by Hugh Thomas (1961),

and

(both 1963) by John H. Elliott,

(1965) by Stanley G. Payne or

by Raymond Carr (1966), among others.

Parallel to this academic attention, Hollywood stars also arrived in search of the shows most stereotyped by 19th century English and French travelers: flamenco and bullfighting, led by Ava Gadner, whose torrid romance with Luis Miguel Dominguín himself It became quite a social event.

Paradoxically, it was then that the world of bullfighting began to definitively cede its throne to soccer.

At the time that Real Madrid began its reign in Europe, the decline of the Fiesta was glimpsed.

While Picasso attended the evening of his life in full recognition of him, Rando, in his earliest youth and like thousands of Spaniards, left the country in search of the opportunities that Spain did not give him.

In Germany, the cradle of expressionism, while earning a living doing a little of everything, he began his fruitful plastic career, beginning to follow the path of Spanish expressionism, as he himself has called it.

It was at that time that Rando, who was in his thirties -barely two years before Picasso's death-, attended his first and only bullfight, a Goyesca -in nothing less than the Bullring of Ronda.

With distant references such as Goya or, already at the beginning of the 20th century, Gutiérrez-Solana, who also had bullfighting as a recurring motif, Rando, unlike them and Picasso, only looked at bullfights tangentially: “[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about the bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the arena, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine, the dance, the kiss… and in the end death… and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public "had plenty of it", that he was only interested in his own experience of the Festival as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity. .

already at the beginning of the 20th century, Gutiérrez-Solana, who also had bullfighting as a recurring motif, Rando, unlike them and Picasso, only looked at the bulls tangentially: “[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the arena, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine, the dance, the kiss... and in the end death … and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public “had plenty of it”, that he was only interested in his own experience of the Fiesta as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

already at the beginning of the 20th century, Gutiérrez-Solana, who also had bullfighting as a recurring motif, Rando, unlike them and Picasso, only looked at the bulls tangentially: “[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the arena, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine, the dance, the kiss... and in the end death … and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public “had plenty of it”, that he was only interested in his own experience of the Fiesta as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

that also had bullfighting as a recurring motif, Rando, unlike them and Picasso, only looked at the bulls tangentially: “[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record of all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the ring, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine, the dance, the kiss... and in the end, death... and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public "had plenty of it", that he was only interested in his own experience of the Festival as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

that also had bullfighting as a recurring motif, Rando, unlike them and Picasso, only looked at the bulls tangentially: “[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record of all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the ring, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine, the dance, the kiss... and in the end, death... and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public "had plenty of it", that he was only interested in his own experience of the Festival as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

“[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about the bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the arena, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine. , the dance, the kiss... and in the end death... and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public “had plenty of it”, that he was only interested in his own experience of the Fiesta as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

“[I never] considered my drawings and paintings about the bullfights as one of my cycles, but I did decide to record all those sensations that the environment produced in me, the movements on the arena, the color, the conjunction of the masculine with the feminine. , the dance, the kiss... and in the end death... and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public “had plenty of it”, that he was only interested in his own experience of the Fiesta as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

the kiss… and in the end death… and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public “had plenty of it”, that he was only interested in his own experience of the Fiesta as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

the kiss… and in the end death… and the public?

Almost without realizing it, by explaining that the public “had plenty of it”, that he was only interested in his own experience of the Fiesta as a nerve for his own artistic experience, he was also expressing the new cultural paradigm to which his own work responded, postmodernity.

This meeting in the arena between Picasso, the pinnacle of modernity, and Rando, a postmodern expression, in Malaga, the city where they were born and which today is an inescapable cultural reference on the international stage —has just announced that it will soon have its CaixaForum—, By confronting both styles and with this controversial theme as a backdrop, it offers a journey through the way of looking at 20th century art.

It is not to be missed.

Antonio López Vega

is director of the Ortega-Marañón University Research Institute of the Complutense University of Madrid.

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