Picasso Year, half a century since the death of that Pablo of Málaga who was sung by another genius, Enrique Morente. In commemoration and memory, tributes, exhibitions, concerts... and also bullfights in Arles, where, as in Céret and Nimes, he appeased his Spanish nostalgia.
This Saturday the traditional Goyesca Bullfight in Arles, at its Rice Fair, will pay tribute to Pablo Picasso, whose life and work are closely linked to the city of Provence bathed by the Rhône, in a unique cultural event that transcends bullfighting.
Picasso's fascination with Arles has a precedent in Van Gogh that is at the same time a reason for it. The mark of the Dutch painter, who was only in the city for one year, between 1888 and 1889, is still in its streets, in the Yellow House (rebuilt after being destroyed by bombs in World War II) where he lived and set up his business. workshop and, of course, at the Van Gogh Foundation. In the fifteen months that Van Gogh lived in Arles he created and signed more than three hundred drawings and paintings, among them The Sunflowers, Café La Nuit, Starry Night over the Rhône or The Society of Arles at the Bullfights.
Van Gogh and bulls, two obsessions that led Picasso to Arles - where he had already painted his collection Las Arlesianas in 1912 - and there he went to Las Arenas, to witness the bullfights with friends such as the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín or the versatile Jean Cocteau . In 1957 an exhibition at the Reattu Museum consolidated Picasso's link with Arles and the following year he created the series of eight portraits of Jacqueline de Arlesiana. In 1971, two years before his death, the city museum dedicated an exhibition to him for which the Malaga painter gave fifty-seven drawings, thus sealing a fruitful relationship.
A relationship that now reaches those Arenas, a two-thousand-year-old Roman Coliseum, a space for culture and in it the Spanish-style bullfights and the traditional camarguesa of the area. Bullfights are not discussed in Arles, as evidenced by the fact that for twenty years, until the last elections, its mayor was the communist Hervé Schiavetti, a great defender of bullfighting. The current one, Patrick de Carolis, star journalist on French television, too.
Today, Saturday in Arles, there is a date with the bulls and with Picasso, because following what is the norm at Goyesca, which always has an added artistic bonus, this year and thanks to a donation from the Picasso Foundation, the Matador painting will be the advertising poster and Fourteen reproductions of different Picasso works of bullfighting inspiration will make up the scenography (in previous years with the signature of, among others, Loren Pallatier, Christian Lacroix, Vaillat, Domingo Zapata, Diego Ramos... or, in 2016, the bullfighter Luis Fco. Esplá, who also bullfighted) both on the sand and on the boards, the burladeros and the curtains. The Arlesian Goyesca also has its own soundtrack in which the usual Chicuelo Orchestra is joined for the occasion by singers and solo musicians and in this edition it will be the young, avant-garde and renowned pianist from Córdoba Juan Antonio Sánchez who will contribute something new, because for first time a piano will sound in La Arenas.
This afternoon, to fight six bulls, six from Jandilla, they will do the parade in Las Arenas de Arles, headed by the management is the local bullfighter Juan Bautista, continuer of the work of his father Luc Jalabert (creator of the Goyesca more than two decades) three bullfighters who are figures, José Mª Manzanares, Alejandro Talavante and Daniel Luque (who will reappear after the very serious bullfight on August 11 in Puerto de Santa María) and the monumental venue will be filled with an audience that recognizes in bullfighting, he lives it with passion and is moved by it.
Just like Picasso
