This blog post excerpt from Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017) explores Pablo Picasso’s character sources for his best known work Guernica. Further examine Picasso’s Paleolithic cave art sources.
By Bernie Taylor | Bernie’s Blog
Social: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Academia
Published May 29, 2020
Grotte de Pair-non-Pair, Gironde, May 1937 (from Chapter 13 – Picasso’s Masks)
This is where Picasso would have stopped to raise his lamp closer to the head of the lower horse – a pregnant mare, as pictured below, another strong female in his life to inspire him. As the boy walked behind him, Picasso would have seen his own shadow on the cave floor and recognized that it was dark. His saying, “I do not seek. I find,” (Sutherland, G. 1936) might have slipped through his lips. The artist might have planned for the lower of the two great horses to be the centerpiece of his project. Why there are two almost identical stacked horses could have crossed his mind. Ascension from earth to heaven? Perhaps these are the same characters in sequence from a long lost Paleolithic myth.
This cave was in France but the style was Franco-Cantabrian. Picasso had also seen etchings and paintings of pregnant mares in the caves of Northern Spain near the town of Guernica. The Franco-Cantabrian Paleolithic artists, in what are now two countries, were once of a common culture that had long ago separated along geo-political lines. The positioning of the mare’s body was unusual. Galloping, standing in profile, or just the view of the head were more traditional artistic perspectives of horses in Paleolithic, classical and contemporary art. The mare’s neck reached back towards her hind with a chest that showed her might. Why did the horses have their heads turned back? Picasso might have wondered. These weren’t natural positions of the equine either in a stable or when worked on a rope in the ring. This horse wasn’t staged for a portrait. The horse appeared to be angry, perhaps defiant. The prehistoric artist had watched many equine in their wild environment so as to capture that unique look. Picasso had to get the demeanor of the horse correct.
Picasso would have noticed that the equine had a different appearance overall than the short and stocky Przewalski’s horse he had seen in other Paleolithic caves. The Agnus Dei panel horses had an Arabic or Celtic strain appearance about them. They were not saddle broken. He would have recognized that these were wild equine. The detail was not as clear as he would have remembered it from earlier visits. There were many intriguing lines etched into the rock face that had a surreal look about them. Some lines were for the equine, others for a large raptor masked man and the beaked head of what appeared to be a tern at his right side. Picasso would have recognized that there is more to see than is most obviously apparent. There might be another horse and other animal beings that were less discernible. The Spaniard may have decided that he would capture the neck, head and chest of the lower horse but not the exact detail of the distinctly pointed rear or cloven fore hooves. “I would rather copy others than repeat myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new,” (Georges-Michel, M. 1957) he was quoted as saying. It would be best not to copy the etching to the detail. This engraved equine might go to print in a cave art book someday and then his source would be known.
Bernie Taylor is the author of Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017).
Explore mankind’s inheritance at Bernie’s Blog
Hi Bernie.
Interesting read. Are the Picasso to cave art connections in any other books?
Fellow Art Lover,
I haven’t seen the connection elsewhere. However, Picasso’s quotes after leaving the caves of Altamira and Lascaux are widely circulated. More on the Picasso connection to Paleolithic cave art can be found at https://beforeorion.com/index.php/pablo-picasso/
Thanks for commenting,
Bernie Taylor
https://www.beforeorion.com
A neck turned backward or elongated, expresses one of two frequent archetypal meanings, as I found in statistical analysis of the universal archetypal structure in hundreds of art and rock art works (Furter 2014: Mindprint): Type 1 /2 Builder /Ruiner (twisted), or type 3 Queen (sacrifice). Agnus dei expresses several type 3 meanings (neck bent, sacrifice, ovid). These features each appear at their own fixed average frequencies in artworks of all ages and ‘cultures’. Each artwork expresses only some, never all of the optional features.
Subconscious expression of archetypal structure explains how enigmatic bent necks appear in artworks worldwide, and their position at character type 1 and/or 2, or 3, in the fixed peripheral sequence of minimal twelve, usually sixteen characters. If the panel nicknamed ‘Agnus Dei’ or Lamb of God, had eleveon or more characters in proximity, I could demosntrate that their eyes were on an axial grid, and their secquence, and features, express about 60% of the currently known recurrent features. Always. No exception found after testing 800 artworks of all styles.
Picasso’s Guernica is one of the artworks demonstrated to subconsciusly express the structure of five layers (features, sequence, ocular axial grid, certain polar features, and time-frame signature in certain central limb joints), in my book mindprint. I found this structure, I did not invent it. Artists do not learn, teach, or even know the structure. They use a very specific visual ‘grammar’ despite some borrowing, despite stylisation, despite their conscious programme. Kindly visit my websites at http://www.mindprintart.wordpress.com or http://www.stoneprintjournal.wordpress.com where the cause of recurrent correspondences and apparent citations is explained. The subconscious model of archetypal structuralist expression resolves the core content of culture. Greetings, Edmond Furter