In 1918 Picasso married ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. The marriage coincided with an emergence in his work of a classical style, perhaps due to a general lifestyle change from bohemia to high society. But Picasso did not feel comfortable at the formal dinner parties and, in the early 1930s, he separated from Khokhlova.
Before Khokhlova had left his life, Picasso had already found a new muse – Marie-Thérèse Walter. The pair met in 1927, when Marie-Thérèse was only seventeen years old, and she remained his lover and muse for the next ten years. She appears in many works of the late-1920s and 1930s.
Picasso was influenced by the Surrealist movement not only in style but also in subject. The Minotaur, a Surrealist symbol, began to appear in much of Picasso’s work of the 1930s: Amorous Minotaur with Female Centaur, for example, or Minotaur Caressing the Hand of a Sleeping Woman with his Head. Most famously, a minotaur appears Minotoauromachie 1935, which many consider to be his greatest print.
Guernica, Picasso’s most celebrated work, was commissioned for the Spanish Pavillion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. The subject of the mural is the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Luftwaffe at General Franco’s request. Picasso had already lampooned the Spanish General during the previous year in a pair of prints titled Dream and Lies of Franco. These prints were sold at the Exposition Internationale, with proceeds donated to republican causes.
