Taurine encounters

Tristan Garel-Jones

The winter season in South America offers European aficionados a pause for reflection. Daniel Hannan dealt effectively in these columns with the AngloSaxon sense of fair play. So long as the corrida is regarded as a contest, so long as Britons believe that God himself is a member of the RSPCA, many will take the bull's side. In fact the bull doesn't have a side at all, any more than does the table when we sit down to eat a Sunday joint.

So now seems a good time to consider the corrida in the context of the Arts. The comda appears in poetry from the time of the mediaeval romances:

King Almanzor of Granada, he hath bid the trumpet sound.

He hath summoned all the Moorish Lords from the hills and plains around.

In gowns of black with silver laced, within the tented ring Eight moors to fight the bull are placed, in presence of the King.

From Gongora, Quevedo and Rivas through to Machado, Ruben Dario and Lorca hardly a great name in Spanish poetry fails to draw inspiration from the corrida. (Just, you might think, as Larkin, Dylan Thomas or Craig Raine are inspired by our national game.) Among my favourites is this clever epigram by Juan de Iriarte (he normally wrote in Latin):

See how the bull scratches the earth with his hoof?

Thus, before charging at the man, he digs his grave.

Or the romantic little verse by Alonso Cortes:

No bull can kill me. No torero can.

There's a girl with black eyes — she can kill this man.

And Lorca's elegy on the death of Sanchez Mejias:

How gentle with the blades of wheat How ruthless with the spurs How tender with the dew

How sparkling in the feria

How awesome with the final,

the last, shrouded bander-111as.

The cotrida has a walk-on part in the plays of Lope de Vega, Calderon and others. Most memorably in Lorca's Maria Pineda:

Again and again he almost caresses The nostrils of the beast and dances Like a giant golden butterfly With russet wings flitting by.

Don Quixote himself has a brush with fighting bulls — as do most Spanish novelists, Perez Galdos and Blasco Ibanez to mention but two. Curiously, however, it is two French 19th-century romantics, Merimee and Gautier, who steal the show. Hardly surprising. Cervantes apart, the novel has never been Spain's strong suit.

Merimee's Carmen, thanks to Bizet, gives many their sole encounter with the taurine world — albeit in caricature. Gautier's Militone — a heady mix of blood, sex and death — is another pastiche. But austere Spain never felt entirely at ease with the soppy romanticism of Lamartine, de Musset and Hugo. And who can blame them? Was it not Sainte-Beuve who, when asked who was the greatest living French writer, replied: 'Victor Hugo. Haas!'

If Spain's place in the novel is debatable, her pre-eminence in the plastic arts is beyond dispute. Goya and Picasso with massive international reputations and equally massive taurine outputs spring easily to mind, Goya's portrait of Jose' Romero and the `Tauromaquia' series of prints are a small part of an output that places the corrida at the centre of his oeuvre. Similarly, Picasso returns again and again to the theme, and it is no coincidence that a bull's head features in his `Guernica'.

What fascinates is Spain's in-depth strength in sculpture and painting. And just as the corrida sets her apart culturally from much of Western Europe, many world-ranking Spanish artists simply can't or won't plug into the New York/ London / Geneva triangle of spin, puff, agents and gallery-owners. Vazquez Diaz's group portraits, Zuloaga's magnificent study of Juan Belmonte: these are great artists — hardly mentioned outside Iberia. Who's ever heard of Oteiza? And yet he is perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 20th century. Gordillo? Franquelo? Antonio Lopez? Why no retrospective at the Tate for Eduardo Arroyo?

Sovereign nations are underpinned by high culture — and low culture, too. Does anyone, other than politicians, seriously believe that Britain's or Spain's identity hinges on a single currency? If so, the Republic of Ireland would have been a lackey and running dog of British imperialism from the day of its foundation. Britain's identity is about cricket, pubs, Shakespeare, Beatrix Potter, Marmite sandwiches and, yes, John Major's spinsters cycling home. The United States and the English language are the culturally dominant forces in the world today. Not an uncomfortable position for us British. But we are also new Europe — and a touch of old Europe too. So how about a major exhibition in London: Spanish Art and Tauromaquia? Or do we really believe God is a member of the RSPCA and that it is fish quotas and currencies that matter?