Evaluación Psicológica Forense 5.5.1.1.1 Datos Básicos del Nivel 3

297 _{Ibid., p.60.}

298 _{See Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D. and Yeats (Austin: University of} Texas Press, 2005) and Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor and Modernist Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) for particularly insightful takes on the interrelation between mathematics, science and literature in the early twentieth century.

underlay its construction, but the spatial and topological scaffolding of art, so painstakingly hidden in nineteenth century realism, was becoming increasingly visible as the arts became less representational. Perhaps the prime example of this early twentieth century tendency can be identified in cubist painting. By carving up an image and rearranging its constituent parts, Georges Braque and Picasso brought the calculations required in the construction of an artwork ever closer to the surface and ever more directly into the consciousness of its viewer. A particularly serendipitous and perhaps pertinent example of this – given its subject matter – can be seen in Picasso’s 1912 composition The Aficionado (fig. 5).

Figure 5 Pablo Picasso, L’Aficionado, 1912, oil on canvas, 135x82cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel.

Composed during the period of synthetic cubism that dominated Picasso’s output after 1910, The

Aficionado is a painting that seems to capture the very essence of the aims and ideals of cubism. The

work is typical of the period in which it was created, meaning that its subject is initially almost impossible to discern at first glance. Any identification of what is being represented is made possible

only by fragments of words or objects strewn across the surface of the canvas, often at seemingly arbitrary and improbable angles and positions. However, even these clues and tags, disparate as they seem to be, sometimes succeed in fooling viewers of the work. So obscure is the figure of the

aficionado that the painting is often referred to as Le Torero (the bullfighter) on account of the presence

of those words in the bottom left corner of the painting. The meaning of those words may not be immediately obvious to the casual viewer of this painting; they may be misconstrued as a title, either of the artwork or the figure it ‘depicts’, leaving some readers of the painting under the impression that what Picasso has attempted to capture here is indeed a bullfighter. A true aficionado, however, would make no such elementary mistake, since they would be well aware that what is significant about those two words is not the words in and of themselves, but rather the rectangular paper surface on which they are rendered. What reveals the identity of the figure in the painting is the fact that these words appear to be printed on a document, held in the right hand of the human subject of the painting. In truth, the Le Torero was a popular taurine publication of the era, which documented and reported on all things related to all things bullfighting. Established in 1891, the magazine was published weekly during the bullfighting season in the summer, and monthly during the close season in the winter.299 _{A typical aficionado attending the bullfight in 1912 would undoubtedly have been}

carrying a copy of this publication, whether in Spain or otherwise. Indeed, this particular painting is not of an aficionado in Spain: in the top left-hand corner of the picture it is possible to make out the name of the city ‘Nimes’, which is situated in the South of France and whose bullring still hosts bullfights to this day. We know from Picasso’s letters to friends in the same year that the painting was produced after he had visited Nimes and seen a bullfight there. Moreover, a letter dated 10th _July

that year made clear that The Aficionado was a transformation of an already existing painting. Picasso wrote that he had ‘transformed an already begun painting of a man into an aficionado; I think he would look good with his banderilla in hand and I’m trying to give him a real southern face.’300

Certainly he had taken pains to ensure that his aficionado was typical of the day: his hair, his smart dress, the newspaper clutched in hand, his bowtie and bearded face. Just what is this spectator doing, however, with the banderilla? The accoutrement of the participant of a bullfight, not the spectator, it is difficult to comprehend what Picasso hoped to achieve by giving this object to his spectator subject. Just a day before he had also written to Kahnweiler: ‘I have been to Nimes and I saw the bullfight. It’s something rare to find the intelligence peculiar to an art in an art. Only Mazantinito did anything of note […]’. 301 _{As with the decision to depict an aficionado with a banderilla,}

299 _{Miriam B. Mandel argues that this is ‘probably the unknown paper that Jake Barnes reads in The Sun Also Rises. She also notes} that Hemingway had read this publication and saved several copies, many of which now reside in the JFK library.

Miriam B. Mandel, A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (Ney York: Camden House, 2004), p.104.

300 _{Cited in J. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology” in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Harry N.} Abrams, 1989), p.399.

301 _{Cited in Francis Frascina et al., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (London: Yale University Press,} 1993), p.159.

Picasso does not elaborate on what he means by this judgement. It is not entirely clear what he deemed ‘the intelligence’ of bullfighting to be, nor how that ‘intelligence’ was manifested in the action of the bullring. However, perhaps what Picasso saw in the bullfight that day was the exposure of its aesthetic skeleton: that is to say that the geometry underpinning the bullfight, its precision and its mathematical intelligence, was identifiable to an artist himself increasingly concerned with lines, planes, and the tessellation of shapes and area.

Belmonte, who had begun his fledgling career in 1908 and killed his first bull two years before Picasso had begun painting The Aficionado, intensified this focus on tessellation. Though clearly bullfighting had previously relied upon a certain rational ‘intelligence’ (to put it in Picasso’s words), Belmonte’s way of working drew attention away from the pageantry and paraphernalia of the ritual and forced it towards the spatial technicalities of torear. According to Hemingway’s account, Joselito, ‘the heritor of all great bullfighters’, was forced to adopt this new style in order to continue to appeal to a paying public who had seen Belmonte do things with the bulls that they had never seen done before, and who wanted more of the same. The adoption of Belmonte’s way of working was not a choice, therefore, but a necessity effected by a change in aesthetic taste that had been roused into being by Belmonte. Without adapting their style, bullfighters would be adversely affected in economic terms. As Hemingway puts it, ‘once [Belmonte] had done it all bullfighters had to do it, or attempt to do it since there was no going back’.302 _{Part of the reason behind this is the change in}

taste that such revolutions in artistic practise tend to engender. As Peter Gay has noted, in literature and the visual arts ‘expressionist poems, abstract paintings, incomprehensible compositions, plotless novels were together making a revolution in taste.’303 _{The same was true in the Spanish bullring,}

where spectators now flocked to see the ‘decadent, the impossible, the almost depraved style of Belmonte’, where he was doing ‘the wonderful things that the public wanted to see’; Belmonte had made it so that all matadors had to follow his lead, he had forced matadors to, as it were, ‘make it new’. In so doing, he had also forced matadors to work closer to the bull, to create a more intense sense of danger, and to give the art a more intense sense of frisson than it had previously possessed. Joselito’s fatal goring in 1920 may well have been no more than a coincidence, but this newfound obsession with paring away the space between the matador and the bull may also have contributed to the tragedy. Clearly Joselito felt uncomfortable with the changes being propagated, and his criticism of Belmonte revealed his uneasiness with Belmonte’s practice. According to Hemingway, the former would often defend his own technique by pointing out what he perceived to be the simulated effect of Belmonte’s work close to the bull, saying: ‘They say that he, Belmonte, works closer to the bull. It