UCLA

This paper examines an artwork produced by Pablo Picasso in 1933 to be photographed and reproduced on the inaugural cover of the important surrealist-oriented luxury art revue Minotaure. In the format of a maquette, the work is the culmination of a little-discussed period of intense material exploration and experimentation for the artist. Through a close study of the work, including the artist’s engagement with his own past cubist collage strategies of the 1910s, this paper unpacks Picasso’s ambiguous identification with the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 30s. In addition to analyzing the work in relation to André Breton’s messianic espousal of revelatory chance operations and the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille’s insurgent theories of base materialism and the informe, this paper shows how Picasso’s work problematizes these aesthetic models in order to articulate, through a series of formal contradictions and material idiosyncrasies, the possibilities of the “sur-réal,” a term coined by Picasso to describe “something more real than reality.”