- Gift of Washington D.C. Chapter of the National Artists Equity Association to the Massillon Museum and Mr. Albert Hise. 70.1.
The Massillon Museum acquired “Artist and Model,” a 1968 black and white print by Leonard Maurer, from the Washington D.C. Chapter of the National Artists Equity Association. It was a gift to the Museum and Mr. Albert Hise, who contacted Picasso’s agent to give it to Picasso; however, the agent was not interested in the piece, thus the gift became the Museum property.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was heavily inspired by Greek myth, and the Minotaur figured predominantly in his work. The Minotaur is a mythological creature with the body of a man with and the head of a bull that was, according to legend, sentenced by King Minos to roam the labyrinth on the island of Crete. The Minotaur is often depicted surrounded by meandering lines to represent this maze. Picasso first included the Minotaur in his oeuvre with the Minotaur collage in 1928, and continued figuring this part-monster into his work with the cover of the first edition of the Surrealist publication Minotaure in 1933, Minotauromachy from 1935, and “The King of the Minotaurs” from 1958, among many others. The artist likely first saw an image of the Minotaur in images of the Palace of Knossos on Crete, included in the 1926 issue of the publication Cahiers d’Art (Notes on Art). As Jacob E. Nyenhuis writes in Myth and the Creative Process, “The Minotaur became Picasso’s iconographic symbol, particularly during the 1930s, when the bestiality within humanity was emerging more clearly on the world stage.”
In this print by Maurer, however, it is curiously not the artist himself who draws the Minotaur. The roles are reversed and it is the half-man, half-bull that treats the artist as the subject of the drawing. This suggests that the role of Minotaur and Picasso are interchangeable, and that the artist used the Minotaur as a double, to serve as an autobiographical form in disguise.
In “Artist and Model,” who is the artist and who is the model? Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art supports just such a hypothesis of interchangeability: “Indeed, Picasso’s understanding of the myth [of the Minotaur] was so profoundly personal that his Minotaurs show little or no trace of their mythic source.” Maurer follows suit in this print, giving the Minotaur more human qualities than his partial humanness might otherwise infer: the cultivated patience required to draw a portrait, and the keen eyes to study and record the subject’s face. Furthermore, the Minotaur is not placed within a maze in this image, and the placeless vista from the window behind the pair does not indicate a Mediterranean landscape (or anywhere specific, for that matter). What meandering lines have already been added to the drawing-in-progress suggest a labyrinth, as the Minotaur is often depicted within the center of a series of mazelike lines. The portrait of Picasso can thus be read both as portrait and labyrinth, further suggesting the complicated inner workings of the artist’s psyche.
