'Olga Picasso' by Picasso at the CaixaForum, Madrid

The current exhibition at the CaixaForum in Madrid is focused on Olga Picasso, wife of Picasso, and it is full of his drawings and many are of her. There are some paintings as well as the many drawings and it's noticeable that paintings of her stop as the marriage deteriorated and he found a new muse and lover.

Olga was Russian and danced with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, which is how Picasso met her since designed the costumes and set for one of the ballets. They met in 1917 and married in 1918. Her family in Russia fought against the revolutionaries and she lost touch with them for a while. She also injured herself and couldn't dance, which took away meaning to her life for her as she settled into becoming Mrs Picasso.

The first few rooms of the exhibition are filled with line drawings of Olga doing various activities, reading, sitting, playing the piano, often with graphite on paper, sometimes very large sheets of paper. Picasso clearly loved her judging from these drawing, both muse and lover. They also show what an excellent draftsman Picasso was, capturing a likeness with a few strokes of a graphite stick, often simple line drawings with no shading or emphasis. I wonder what Olga thought about being drawn again and again? Did you enjoy it, enjoy the attention? See it as the price of being the wife of an artist who was becoming increasingly famous and rich? Or was it something to be endured?

Then the inevitable happened and they had a child, a son they called Paulo. The drawings and paintings change to focus on motherhood with lots of drawings of Olga with Paolo, mother and son, Virgin and Child, an old, old subject. I wonder how many of these paintings and drawings the mother and baby actually posed for and how many were made up compositions by Picasso?

There are also drawings about woman as a creator, as being fecund and producing the next generation. I particularly liked a large drawing called 'The Source' with Olga lounging against a rock with an urn in her lap which is emptying it's contents onto the ground with one of her breast exposed. It's almost an image of the mother goddess, the fertility goddess waiting to give birth to the next race of humans.

We then see them as a family group as Paulo grows up and becomes a boy rather than a baby. There are drawings of the circuses they went to see, a family on the beach, portraits of Paulo and one with him dressed up in a harlequin outfit just like his dad. It's all very domestic and serene but, at the same time, the marriage was breaking down and Picasso had found another lover, another muse to inspire him, a 17 year old girl in Paris. The drawings and paintings take another turn and become darker, or at least those chosen to be in the exhibition become darker. 

Picasso creates his own mythology around him being a Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, a primal figure. There are many drawings of the Minotaur, mainly focused on lust and passion, occasionally violence. There was one drawing of the Minotaur having rough sex with a female centaur - I've never come across female centaurs before but I suppose there must have been some. There's also a drawing called 'Bacchic Scene with Minotaur' that looks less about Bacchus and more about group sex to me. What was going on in his imagination during this period? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that.

I'm not sure about this exhibition. I found it rather unsettling, the move from sweet, romantic young love to the the darker world of the Minotaur. It's quite a journey and not what I expected when I went into the exhibition. Anyway, here's 'Sitting Minotaur with a Dagger' from 1933.