A Balcony at the Bullfight

In The First Episode of the classic Art docuseries The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes makes the insightful remark that “no painter ever put his anxiety about castration more plainly than Picasso did.“

But this painting by Catalan painter Canals also speaks to me of the male artist’s terror of his female subjects.

I have had reason to think about the Cubists lately, though Canals was certainly not one. However the Picasso museum is literally around the corner from where I sleep, and this is where I saw the Canals work in the first place. He was one of the figures that haunted what Hughes called the “warren of cheap studios” of the Bateau-Lavoir in Paris, from which Cubism arguably in the early 20th century.

Women associated with the Bateau Lavoir were often muses, models, or lovers of male artists rather than figures who were recognised as artists themselves. And is it just me or do the gazes of the women in this painting imply judgement and shades of contempt?

Perhaps Canals provoked such a response in his models, but it’s far more likely that he was projecting his fear into their visages. It reminds me of the sobering remark made by Margaret Atwood that "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

It’s also fascinating to see such a quintessentially Spanish, Lolailo, and non-Catalan coded as Bullfighting to be the subject of Canals painting. It was when the women of Spain were said to have dressed up in all of their finery.

As mentioned in the 2012 Sotheby’s listing for the painting, the spectators of the bullfight, perhaps as much as anything, were said to have enjoyed the sport of watching each other, perhaps even more than watching the bullfight.

It’s also an interesting note that the spectators themselves are the subject of the painting, rather than the spectacle of bullfighting itself. The spectator a subject of interest feels quite modern, though it probably isn’t.

I had become rather fascinated with one of the women pictured in this painting, as the painting was hung in an exhibition tribute to her at the Picasso museum. I also rather love that I, as an art dilettante rather than an art expert, had never heard of Joaquim Sunyers or Ricard Canals until that exhibition about Fernande, I like defining them in my head as her former lovers, the way that she seems constantly defined only through her relationship with Picasso.

The photograph of Canal’s partner and Fernande shows how little the painter did them justice, and once you see the photograph, you can clearly pick the two friends out. They appear with heads tilted towards one another, at the left hand corner of the painting. And, once again, I feel struck by Fernande’s piercing and intelligent gaze.