La corrida toute entière baigne dans une atmosphere érotique
– Michel Leiris, Miroir de la tauromachie, 1964.
One of Picasso’s earliest childhood paintings is a small work done in Malaga at the age of eight.1Picador, Malaga, 1889–90, oil on panel, Museum of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, New York, 1980, p. 16. It shows a mounted picador in the bullring, intensely observed by three hatted spectators. The little oil sketch is prophetic, for along with the other themes of performance which fascinated Picasso – acrobats and clowns, ballet and theatre – the bullfight was to appear at critical points in his life. Picasso rarely abandoned subject matter which was important for him; he took it up when it met an emotional need, and as readily laid it aside when it had served its purpose. In these early days he used it to convey the involvement of the crowd and his own excitement as a spectator.
By 1902 he had already attached a symbolic importance to the central figures of the drama: the disembowelled, dying horse, the ferocious bull, the gored matador, and the mother and child who react with horror and fear at the scene. After travelling to Spain with Diaghilev in 1917, Picasso turned once more to the theme, now charging it with an eroticism which was to be its marked characteristic in the thirties. Even Guernica, his greatest political statement, was based on the conflict of the corrida. Near the end of his life he summoned the participants of the bullfight in his Suite 347, wedging them amongst the dramatis personae of his life, thereby bonding them to the major figurative images which had held an emotional significance throughout his entire oeuvre.2The 347 etchings were carried out between 16 March and 5 October 1968, and include family portraits, self-portraits, quotations from his own work, and that of painters whom he admired. For a discussion of the autobiographical nature of Suite 347, see Beryl Barr-Sharrar, ‘Some Aspects of Early Autobiographical Imagery in Picasso’s Suite 347’, Art Bulletin, December 1972, pp. 525–27.
Picasso’s art is inextricably linked to the events of his life, and from the beginnings his images form an enigmatic but immediate diary of the people and situations which surrounded him. Even when he appeared to be furthest from the subject and to hold experiment with form in highest regard, as he did between 1907 to 1914 in his Cubist work, he made oblique references to his personal life. In the summer of 1912, for example, he dedicated a series of pictures to Eva Gouel, unobtrusively writing across the canvas, ‘J’aime Eva’.
Unlike Matisse or Miro there is little distance between the image set down and the clatter of daily events. With Picasso this was intentional. Always an astute observer and realist, he borrowed from whatever was within arm’s reach, bending it to reveal his personal conflicts and preoccupations. Yet his observations are never directly stated. Instead he layers and conflates his symbols to form a personal mythology. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the prolific graphic work of the 1930s. Between 1930 and 1937 when he completed Guernica, Picasso externalised his private life in a way that he had rarely done before: he turned to classical mythology, welded it to Spanish tradition, and reinterpreted both to fit his needs.
Femme Torero I (fig. 1) and Corrida3Femme Torero I, 12 June 1934, etching, Bloch 1329, Geiser 425/B, 49.7 x 69.9 cm. Purchased by The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Helen M. Schutt Trust, Governor, 1980, Ρ.151/1980. Corrida, 8 September 1934, etching, Bloch 1330, Geiser 433, 49.5 x 69.7 cm. Felton Bequest 1981, P.24/1981. (fig. 2) were both executed in the summer of 1934, at the height of Picasso’s liaison with Marie-Thérèse Walter and a year before his permanent separation from his wife, Olga Koklova. Between the end of May and early September the two lovers avidly followed the bullfights, passing through San Sebastian, Madrid and Toledo, and arriving on the 6 September in Barcelona.
Since 1932 Picasso had been engaged in making a concentrated series of etchings in which the bull and horse had appeared in mortal combat in the arena. Indeed by 6 September 1933 he had done a small oil where a female toreador is draped over her dying horse, both then being hurled onto the bull’s back with unusual force.4Courses de Taureaux, 6 September 1933, Boisgeloup, in C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, vol. VIII, pl. 138. This was the first image where he included the female toreador, whose profile is unmistakably that of the sensual Marie-Thérèse. The overwhelming appeal of imagining her in a state of actively engaging the bull’s affection, and in the aftermath of soporific satisfaction, prompted Picasso to do five etchings on the subject, all dated between 12 and 22 June 1934.
On their own, the five Femme Torero5Β. Geiser, Picasso: Peintre-Graveur, Berne, 1958, vol. II, pls 425–29, lists the series together as follows: Femme Torero I, 12 June 1934, Paris, p. 425; Femme Torero II, 20 June 1934, Paris, p. 426; Femme Torero III, 22 June 1934, Paris, p. 427; Femme Torero IV, 22 June 1934, Paris, p. 428; Femme Torero V, 22 June 1934, Paris, p. 429. Femme Torero II and III were selected in 1939 by Vollard for the Vollard Suite. etchings (figs 1, 3–6) are emblems of Picasso’s passion and Marie-Thérèse’s drowsy eroticism. He had already repeatedly phrased her in this position, which recalls Fuseli’s Nightmare6Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts. – head thrown back, throat exposed, and mouth open (fig. 7).7Nu couché, 13 August 1932, Boisgeloup, in Zervos, op. cit., vol. VIII, pl. 11. Located in the wider context of other work done around the same time, the etchings provide a key to Picasso’s attempts to construct for himself a highly personal mythology, as well as pointing to the interests which he had picked up in his association with the Surrealists: primitivism, Mithraic rites, and the legend of the Minotaur. Furthermore, the etchings were also a means of alleviating the tensions brought about by the personal crisis in which he was embroiled with Olga.
Picasso had probably met Marie-Thérèse in 1931, although it may have been as early as 1927.8Timothy Hilton, Picasso’s Picassos, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981, p. 62, argues that they met in 1927 when Picasso approached her in the street. Most other writers place the date at either 1931 or 1932; Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, New York, 1973, p. 277; John Golding, ‘Picasso and Surrealism’, Picasso in Retrospect, New York, 1973, p. 110; and William Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, p. 226; along with others, opt for the early thirties as the time of their meeting. She was 21, he was 50. An archetypal image of Nordic beauty (she was Swiss), she immediately appealed to Picasso for her easy nature as well as for her appearance. Unlike Olga, who had sought a position in high society and who pursued a lavish and extravagant way of life, Marie-Thérèse seems to have been content to play sport. She was little interested in Picasso’s art and, if we are to believe his interpretation of her, she had an enormous appetite for sleep. Most probably she satisfied Picasso’s need for a passive companion whose intrusions were minimal, and she provided him with a dreamy subject matter, in direct contrast to the violent images in which Olga had recently appeared, all spiky tongue and gnashing teeth.9Bust of a woman with self portrait, Paris, February 1929, in Zervos, op cit., vol. VII, p. 248.
In both Femme Torero I and Corrida there are three major participants: the bull, the horse and the female toreador. In order to understand the full implications of Picasso’s deployment of these figures in 1934, one must turn to the preceding year when he designed the front cover for the first issue of Minotaure, and when he etched most of the plates of the Vollard Suite.
Edited by his close friend, Paul Eluard, and the major spokesman for Surrealism, André Breton, Minotaure drew together some of the major figures of the Surrealist circle. In the first issue Breton wrote a favourable article on Picasso’s most recent work, with accompanying photographs which exposed the chaos of his accumulated possessions. Brassai’s dramatic documentation of the artist’s recent sculpture at Boisgeloup complete the picture. In addition to four minotaurs, the editors ran the illustrated drawings for The Crucifixion and eighteen recent drawings, Surrealist in their intent and humour, of The anatomy. Picasso’s work was clearly being given visual prominence, one suspects because Breton was so eager to enlist him as a card-carrying member of the circle. Alongside Picasso’s work were articles by Reverdy, Eluard, Dali and Crevel, with Leiris’s piece on the funeral dances of the Dogon, and Lacan on style and paranoia. Artistically Picasso was challenged only by Masson’s Massacres, brutal drawings of decapitation, beatings and stabbings, and by Matisse’s illustrations for Mallarmé’s L’Apres Midi d’un Faune. Both artists’ work had been selected for its violent tone, and contrary to the meaning of the poem, Matisse’s drawings have a particular brutal appearance, in the shape of a woman wrestling with a faun.
It was no coincidence that the magazine was called Minotaure,10André Masson and Georges Bataille suggested to Skira, the publisher, that the title be either Le Minotaure or Labyrinthe; see M. Ries, ‘Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur’, Art Journal XXXII, 2, Winter 1972–73, pp. 143–45. nor that Picasso’s cover revealed the muscular man-beast, dagger in hand, on a background of doilies, crumpled foil, cardboard, ribbon and wallpaper. Everything in the magazine points in one way or another to an interest in the subconscious (Dali’s paranoid-critical method applied to Millet’s L’Angelus), in aberrations (an essay on de Sade’s psychological tendencies), or in the ritualistic (the Dogon’s funeral rites). The minotaur stood for all three. Symbolically located at the heart of the labyrinth, he signified the inner reaches of the subconscious; as the issue of Pasiphaë and the bull, he was born of irregular parentage and to appease him the Athenians ritualistically sacrificed their young every year. Half-man, half-beast, he represents the inner tension between civilisation and brutality.
For Picasso he meant all of this and more. The key resides in the Vollard Suite, where he is at once gentle and barbarous. Unravelling the meaning of what appears to be one hundred unrelated plates, Anita Coles Costello has argued that the theme which links the plates is Picasso’s search for artistic identity. He sees himself as the calm Apollonian sculptor, who, accompanied by a Marie-Thérèse figure, observes the sculpture which he has fashioned.11The National Gallery of Victoria holds ten plates from The Vollard Suite, of which the following illustrate the theme of the sculptor’s studio and the artist’s search for identity: Sculpteur, Modèle et Buste Sculpté, 1933, Bloch, 148. Le Repos du Sculpteur devant un Nu à la Draperie, Bloch, 160. Sculpteur et son Modèle devant une Fenêtre, Bloch, 168. Sculpteur et Modèle Agenouillé, Bloch, 178. Minotaure, Buveur et Femmes, Bloch, 200. Personnages Masqués et Femme Oiseau, Bloch, 227. Alternately he is the minotaur, the Dionysian reveller who toasts his companions, sleeps behind a diaphanous veil, dies in the arena, or causes havoc by attacking the women.12H. Bolliger, The Vollard Suite, London, 1977: the Minotaur toasts his friends (pp. 83, 85, 92); sleeps behind a diaphanous veil (pp. 86, 91); dies (pp. 89, 90); attacks women (pp. 84, 87, 88, 93). Only a year later, in plates executed in September and October 1934, he appears blind and dependent on those around him. With his loss of sight, he raises his hand to feel rather than see the world, a reminder that touch forms the basis for sculpture-making, also the domain of the artist. The minotaur, a brutal rapist, an affectionate bon-vivant, is Picasso. On numerous occasions he gave the minotaur a face humanly plausible, made perhaps to resemble his own (fig. 8).13Tête de taureau, 12 July 1934, Boisgeloup, in Zervos, op. cit., vol. VIII, pl. 213.
At its roots in Cretan myth, the minotaur was the punishment which Poseidon meted out to Minos for having deceived him. To prove his good favour with the gods and thus gain ascendancy to the throne, Minos had asked Poseidon to send him a bull. Poseidon did so, sending the Marathonian or Cretan bull, which Minos was to sacrifice. But, seeing the animal, Minos sent it to his herds and substituted another on the altar. In anger, the god caused Pasiphaë, Minos’ wife, to fall in love with the bull, thus resulting in the birth of the minotaur. Daedalus, Minos’ architect, was then employed to stable the beast, and the labyrinth which he constructed ensured its imprisonment. The minotaur made annual demands for the sacrifice of seven Athenian males. Theseus, disguised as one of them, made his way through the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne’s thread, and killed the monster.14Aeneid V, Metamorphosis, VIII.
Undoubtedly Picasso knew the legend, especially since it was one on which the Surrealists had laid such emphasis. André Masson and George Bataille had reintroduced the story of the minotaur and the labyrinth, making it a central theme in Surrealist mythology.15Masson makes the following claim, ‘en realité, c’est Bataille et moi qui avons reintroduit ce “personnage” peu familier et qui est devenu avec le labyrinthe un thème de la mythologie surréaliste’; quoted in Jean-Paul Clebert, Mythologie d’André Masson, Geneva, 1971, p. 37. Masson, who was persistently intrigued with violence, sex and death, first featured the minotaur as early as 1922, and ten years later exhibited a group of engravings which included The coupling of the Minotaur and virgin.
Not just the myth interested the Surrealists, but related ritualistic practice as well. In the second issue of Minotaure Michel Leiris made a lengthy examination of a North African sect, whose well-being depended on the annual sacrifice of a bull. The article was accompanied by a series of documentary photographs which showed the participants exorcising evil through the slow execution of the animal. He also likened this ritual practice to a bullfight performed by hand, where certain procedures, such as the bull falling to the right, had to be strictly followed.16Μ. Leiris, ‘Le Taureau de Seyfou Tchenger’, Minotaure 2, p. 75. Miro’s whimsical interpretation of the minotaur myth followed in the next issue (3–4, p. 14), looking decidedly lighthearted in this serious company.
What did the minotaur mean for Picasso, and why was his appeal so immediately taken up? For Picasso the distance which separated the idea of the bull and the minotaur was marginal, and the incorporation of the man-beast legend into his imagery seemed a logical progression. In 1925 he had already assigned anthropomorphic qualities to the bull and horse, whose erotic play clearly paralleled that of their human counterparts (figs 9–10).17Dessin à la mine de plomb, 1925, in Zervos, op. cit., vol. V, pl. 414, and Couple nu, 1925, ibid., pl. 439. This easy interchangeability is critical in the interpretation of the Femme Torero series.
During the summer and autumn of 1934 Picasso had concentrated on two themes, each of them reinforcing the other: one was the bullfight with its engaging drama between bull, woman and horse; the other was the plight of the blind minotaur. The first was Picasso’s tribute to eroticism and desire. He had aestheticised simple carnal love, dressing it up in a typical Spanish costume. The tale of the blind minotaur is a direct antithesis, for it formalises the loss of potency. In contrast to the participatory, interdependent nature of love, the minotaur is not just alone. He is utterly dependent on the young girl who leads the way. Picasso’s final attempt to pull these two contradictory strains together resulted in one of the most disturbing etchings ever executed by him: the Minotauromachy of 1935.
Like the best of Picasso’s art, Femme Torero I works on many levels. It is the only plate of the five in which the female matador is an active participant; it is also the closest that the bull comes to taking on the guise of the minotaur, for the bull’s physiognomy is virtually identical. Having laid aside her sword, the toreador now falls into a deep sleep in the remaining four plates. Who is she and what does she signify? Toreador, Cretan acrobat, Pasiphaë and Europa are the associative roles which she takes up in the guise of Marie-Thérèse.
The Spanish bullfight provides the initial clue to her identity. Like the legend of the minotaur, its origins can be traced to Crete. We know from a multitude of paintings, statuettes and reliefs that there were both male and female toreadors and that they played a central role in Minoan civilisation. Initially the sport consisted only of the bare-handed capture of the bull by men, who then clung to its horns as an act of bravery, but this was later superseded by a far more engaging spectacle. In an acrobatic performance athletes rushed towards the bull, grasped the horns and somersaulted on to its back. It was a hazardous game, calling on nerve and dexterity. A thousand years later, in the 5th century, Thessaly, a toreador, pursued the bull on horseback, then leaned over, twisted its horns and broke its neck. This latter version was the one introduced into Italy by Julius Caesar, and subsequently into Spain. But the Spanish bullfight always retained the thrilling spectacle of skilled and dextrous fighters whose choreographic movements recalled the Minoan acrobats.18The dance-like movements of the toreadors is a close parallel to the ritual performance enacted in the arena outside the palace at Knossus; see A. B. Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, vol. 1, p. 479.
Picasso captured this pliant energy in his earliest picture of the female toreador, a small oil sketch done on 6 September 1933.19Courses de Taureaux, 6 September 1933, Boisgeloup, in Zervos, op, cit., vol. VIII, p. 138. She is the only figure of all the images to hold onto the bull’s horn, and in doing so she reinforces the notion that this is not far from the original meaning of the bullfight. The religious value for the Minoans lay in the athlete’s contact with the sacred bull’s horns, where his strength and fertility gathered. Like the early Minoan acrobats, Picasso’s female toreadors are engaged in a fertility rite, and the artist’s own identification with the bull-minotaur, with Marie-Thérèse cast as the acrobat-toreador, makes the story especially poignant.
There is an additional aspect of the female-bull myth which is also elicited by Picasso’s Femme Torero I and the Corrida, and that is the familiar story of Europa and the bull. Abducted by Zeus, who had transformed himself into a beautiful white bull, Europa too ended up in Crete, where she became the goddess responsible for the fertility of the earth. She is traditionally represented mounted on the bull, with one hand on the fertilising horn and the other holding a flower. Like Pasiphaë she is also a lunar figure, and the bull a solar symbol. Picasso probably did not consciously concern himself much with the intricacies of these related myths, selecting as he did whatever aspect suited him. However, he did consciously layer his symbols in the Crucifixion of 1930, a painting which reveals his awareness of Mithraic rites.
Ruth Kaufmann has deciphered the complex iconography of the painting, showing how the artist linked Mithraic rites and Christianity in his mind as religions which employed sacrifice as a primary feature of their ritual.20Ruth Kaufmann, ‘Picasso’s Crucifixion of 1930’, Burlington Magazine III, September 1969, pp. 553–61. Mithras was a sun god who sacrificed a bull, and Picasso made the link to the sacrificed Christ visually explicit by placing the two figures adjacent to one another in the picture. The figure appears as a lunar-solar symbol, half-dark, half-light, bringing to mind that the same symbolism applies to Europa and the bull. Picasso’s probable source was an article published in Documents by Georges Bataille,21Georges Bataille, ‘Soleil Pourri’, Documents no 3, 2ème année, Paris, 1930, pp. 113–19. although the artist may have discussed the theme with Bataille as well as with other Surrealist writers. The point is that the image of Mithraic sacrifice interested Picasso, and he freely incorporated it into his work.
Femme Torero I and Corrida are also based on a sacrificial rite, with Eros (the female) on the altar of brutality (the bull). In an image which correlates the public ritual of the bullfight with the private ritual of sex, Picasso pits the violence of the arena with that of the bedroom. In earlier etchings where the bull and horse engage in combat, the horse is often gored, and left with its entrails exposed. Francoise Gilot has said that for Picasso the horse was a female symbol, and it has been suggested that its physical suffering is a reminder of both sexual violence and the birth trauma.
Three years after Femme Torero I and Corrida appeared, Michel Leiris, an old friend, published Miroir de la tauromachie, in which he speculated on the erotic atmosphere of the bullring. He noted the prestige of the matador and his Don Juanesque reputation, his flashy costume like the colourful plumage of birds, the phallic nature of the bull, and that the matador’s movements had a rhythmic pattern similar to coitus. The bullfight is a ritual externalisation of our most private emotions: ‘Bullfighting may degenerate into acrobatics or ballet, but in its essential form it knows death with an intimacy entertainment ignores.’22Michel Leiris, Miroir de la tauromachie, Paris, 1964.
Perhaps the seriousness which the bullfight had always implied for Picasso propelled him to select it as the image which would carry the intensity of his feeling in that summer of 1934. The universality of myth, with its infinite associations, enabled him to disengage the events of his life from their daily appearance and to quickly summarise the constant relationship between eroticism and fertility in the context of death. With a history deeply rooted in Mediterranean thought and action, the bullfight was the logical focus for his ideas.
Memory Holloway, Department of Visual Arts, Monash University (in 1982).
Notes
1 Picador, Malaga, 1889–90, oil on panel, Museum of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, New York, 1980, p. 16.
2 The 347 etchings were carried out between 16 March and 5 October 1968, and include family portraits, self-portraits, quotations from his own work, and that of painters whom he admired. For a discussion of the autobiographical nature of Suite 347, see Beryl Barr-Sharrar, ‘Some Aspects of Early Autobiographical Imagery in Picasso’s Suite 347’, Art Bulletin, December 1972, pp. 525–27.
3 Femme Torero I, 12 June 1934, etching, Bloch 1329, Geiser 425/B, 49.7 x 69.9 cm. Purchased by The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Helen M. Schutt Trust, Governor, 1980, Ρ.151/1980. Corrida, 8 September 1934, etching, Bloch 1330, Geiser 433, 49.5 x 69.7 cm. Felton Bequest 1981, P.24/1981.
4 Courses de Taureaux, 6 September 1933, Boisgeloup, in C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, vol. VIII, pl. 138.
5 Β. Geiser, Picasso: Peintre-Graveur, Berne, 1958, vol. II, pls 425–29, lists the series together as follows: Femme Torero I, 12 June 1934, Paris, p. 425; Femme Torero II, 20 June 1934, Paris, p. 426; Femme Torero III, 22 June 1934, Paris, p. 427; Femme Torero IV, 22 June 1934, Paris, p. 428; Femme Torero V, 22 June 1934, Paris, p. 429. Femme Torero II and III were selected in 1939 by Vollard for the Vollard Suite.
6 Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts.
7 Nu couché, 13 August 1932, Boisgeloup, in Zervos, op. cit., vol. VIII, pl. 11.
8 Timothy Hilton, Picasso’s Picassos, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981, p. 62, argues that they met in 1927 when Picasso approached her in the street. Most other writers place the date at either 1931 or 1932; Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, New York, 1973, p. 277; John Golding, ‘Picasso and Surrealism’, Picasso in Retrospect, New York, 1973, p. 110; and William Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, p. 226; along with others, opt for the early thirties as the time of their meeting.
9 Bust of a woman with self portrait, Paris, February 1929, in Zervos, op cit., vol. VII, p. 248.
10 André Masson and Georges Bataille suggested to Skira, the publisher, that the title be either Le Minotaure or Labyrinthe; see M. Ries, ‘Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur’, Art Journal XXXII, 2, Winter 1972–73, pp. 143–45.
11 The National Gallery of Victoria holds ten plates from The Vollard Suite, of which the following illustrate the theme of the sculptor’s studio and the artist’s search for identity: Sculpteur, Modèle et Buste Sculpté, 1933, Bloch, 148. Le Repos du Sculpteur devant un Nu à la Draperie, Bloch, 160. Sculpteur et son Modèle devant une Fenêtre, Bloch, 168. Sculpteur et Modèle Agenouillé, Bloch, 178. Minotaure, Buveur et Femmes, Bloch, 200. Personnages Masqués et Femme Oiseau, Bloch, 227.
12 H. Bolliger, The Vollard Suite, London, 1977: the Minotaur toasts his friends (pp. 83, 85, 92); sleeps behind a diaphanous veil (pp. 86, 91); dies (pp. 89, 90); attacks women (pp. 84, 87, 88, 93).
13 Tête de taureau, 12 July 1934, Boisgeloup, in Zervos, op. cit., vol. VIII, pl. 213.
14 Aeneid V, Metamorphosis, VIII.
15 Masson makes the following claim, ‘en realité, c’est Bataille et moi qui avons reintroduit ce “personnage” peu familier et qui est devenu avec le labyrinthe un thème de la mythologie surréaliste’; quoted in Jean-Paul Clebert, Mythologie d’André Masson, Geneva, 1971, p. 37.
16 Μ. Leiris, ‘Le Taureau de Seyfou Tchenger’, Minotaure 2, p. 75. Miro’s whimsical interpretation of the minotaur myth followed in the next issue (3–4, p. 14), looking decidedly lighthearted in this serious company.
17 Dessin à la mine de plomb, 1925, in Zervos, op. cit., vol. V, pl. 414, and Couple nu, 1925, ibid., pl. 439.
18 The dance-like movements of the toreadors is a close parallel to the ritual performance enacted in the arena outside the palace at Knossus; see A. B. Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, vol. 1, p. 479.
19 Courses de Taureaux, 6 September 1933, Boisgeloup, in Zervos, op, cit., vol. VIII, p. 138.
20 Ruth Kaufmann, ‘Picasso’s Crucifixion of 1930’, Burlington Magazine III, September 1969, pp. 553–61.
21 Georges Bataille, ‘Soleil Pourri’, Documents no 3, 2ème année, Paris, 1930, pp. 113–19.
22 Michel Leiris, Miroir de la tauromachie, Paris, 1964.