Berlin, Sep 13 (IANS/EFE): A new exhibition at Berlin's Kupferstichkabinett Museum provides visitors with a window into Spanish artist Pablo Picasso's passion for women and bulls via 180 prints, drawings, paintings and other works.
"Pablo Picasso: Women, Bulls and Old Masters", which began Friday and runs until Jan 12, 2014, includes works from the museum's holdings and others from public and private collections.
"Picasso created the most important oeuvre in 20th-century art not only in his capacity as a painter and sculptor, but also and above all as a draughtsman and printmaker," the museum said in a statement posted on its website.
The works in the exhibition cover seven decades of Picasso's output, ranging from a 1900 painting to the erotic works of the 1960s.
Picasso (1881-1973) was heavily influenced by the imagery of bullfighting as a Spaniard living in exile in France and because he often accompanied his father to bull rings as a boy, curator Anita Beloubek-Hammer said Thursday.
"For me, the bull is the proudest animal in existence," Picasso said on one occasion.
Picasso saw the minotaur - the mythical creature that was half man and half bull - as his alter ego, Beloubek-Hammer said.
Bullfights symbolised the battle of the sexes for Picasso, with the man represented by the figure of the bullfighter and the woman by the bull, Beloubek-Hammer said.
Women were another important theme in Picasso's work, representing the different attitudes toward life.