This is a wider-margin work, with a limited edition of only 50 prints.

Hand-signed by the artist. Signed lower right.
Printed by, Atelier Lacourière, Paris

Plate 64 from the Vollard Suite. Minotaur Defeated By Youth in Arena Paris 29 MAI XXXIII

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This original etching, Minotaure Vaincu (Vanquished Minotaur), Picasso created the etching plate that was used to print this etching on May 29, 1933. The suite was named for Picasso's art dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939). Vollard was responsible for giving the first one-man show in Paris for Picasso in 1901. Vollard also gave the first solo shows for artists Cezanne and Matisse in the Paris gallery he created in 1893 where he also exhibited art by Degas, Rodin, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, among others. In most of these early shows Vollard defied public taste, supporting avante-garde artists, all of whom later painted portraits of Vollard in appreciation for his early support.

Evident among all the prints in the Vollard Suite is a nod to neoclassicism, influenced by Picasso's earlier trips to art centers in Italy including Rome, Florence, Naples and Pompeii. This image is reflects a young man putting the Minotaur to death in an arena. The etching is autobiographical in that the mythical Minotaur—part man, part bull—was Picasso's alter ego in the 1930s and part of a broader exploration of Classicism that persisted in his work for many years. The Minotaur was also emblematic for Surrealists, who saw it as the personification of forbidden desires.

Picasso kept returning to images of bulls, bullfighters, bull-men but it is the Minotaur, with all its monstrous hybridity, that reveals something central about how Picasso viewed himself across his entire oeuvre.