Engraved lines dance across the board of the linocut « Le Banderillero », telling the story of a corridà, a subject cherished by Picasso. Unlike most of the bullfighting scenes Picasso created, this work is one of the few where the focus is not on the matador, but on an earlier moment of the fight: the banderillero.

A true Spaniard and artist by birth, Picasso has depicted variations on bullfighting scenes since he was a precocious boy, including an 1889 oil painting of the picador, done when he was only 8 years old.A banderillo is a bullfighter whose role is to thrust darts (banderillas) into the bull’s shoulders to anger and weaken the animal before the matador finishes it off. Picasso shows an arena filled with spectators where the lithe banderillo is doing his job. Behind him, to our left, the matador waves his cape. The bull lunges forward, head lowered with his horns nearly striking the banderillo, just as the darts strike their target. Abstract lines suggest the many vectors of force and motion in the brutal, balletic scene, for a moment of high artistic and dramatic tension.

This print is the fourth state of the first block. Picasso returned to the block for one final round of cutting. He removed much of the surface in the areas surrounding the figures of the matador, bandillero, and bull. Arnéra now inked the original block in black and printed over the previously double-printed impressions to produce the finished prints. The result was an edition of three-color prints in caramel, chocolate, and black, strongly reminiscent of ancient painted pottery, one of Picasso’s great inspirations.