The Bull Made from a Bicycle

*Tête de taureau* (Bull's Head) is made by simply rearranging a bicycle saddle and a set of handlebars. Neither has anything to do with a bull, yet put together, they become a bull's head. But would a saddle on its own look like a bull's face, or handlebars alone like a bull's horns? Of course not. It was an intriguing kind of art that Picasso showed the public at the time.

The era played a part in the choice of materials. In 1942 the Second World War was raging, and artists in Nazi-occupied Paris had their freedom curtailed. They couldn't exhibit, and materials were severely restricted. That didn't mean Picasso stopped working. If anything, he seemed to defy the restrictions by turning whatever lay around him into material: scraps of wood, bones, bits of paper, cigarette packs. When he couldn't get canvas, he painted on boards or hardboard, and some works from the period are even painted on newspaper. Building a bull's head from a bicycle saddle and handlebars was part of the same impulse.

This kind of art is called assemblage, a French word meaning "gathering." Junk and everyday objects are brought together to create a new work, so the arrangement and composition of the objects matter enormously: the pieces have to fit together just right to become something new. It's closely related to the papier collé, or collage, that Georges Braque and Picasso invented. Where collage glued fabric or magazine clippings onto a flat surface, assemblage takes the idea into three dimensions, and *Bull's Head* is considered a pioneering work of the form. Breaking something apart and radically recreating it was also the heart of Cubism, which fragmented its subjects and showed the front, side, and back at once on a single canvas, in a seemingly twisted way. From Cubism to collage to assemblage, tearing a subject apart and rebuilding it anew can be seen as one thread running through Picasso's art.