Le Prince et la Meute, one of eight works that Amadeo took to the historic Armory Show in 1913, which shocked the observers given the intensity of its cubist spatial disorientations and decompositions. The most expensive of this artist’s works in the show, it was the only one that remained unsold. The origin of the composition lies in one of the illustrations for Flaubert’s La légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier, which Amadeo published in the same year, although the motif of the mounted figure, in which the animal embodies the dynamic force of the image, is of particular importance in Amadeo’s work as an element of his personal mythology and a constant theme which underwent the most drastic visual reinventions between 1911 and 1913, as in this phase of extreme geometrization. Horses were a recurring theme in the iconography of the avant-gardes in the first half of the 1910s (e.g. Boccioni, Duchamp-Villon, Kandinsky, Macke, Marc or Severini*) and Amadeo’s treatment of them produced unexpected results, ranging from Avant la corrida, which was exhibited alongside this work and is formally linked to it, to works such as Don Quixote or (Cavaliers).

 

Occupying the centre of the painting, a highly adorned and mannerist prince poses haughtily on horseback. Both rider and animal are in profile, bringing together, with mathematical rigour, a symmetrical pack of greyhounds and what might be rabbits and a falcon at their side. These are the usual inhabitants of the medieval imagery which Amadeo insistently defined that year in fictitious, exotic forest settings featuring copious flora and fauna and vibrant colours. However, this eccentric programme of Amadeo's, with all of its paradoxes and anachronisms, co-exists here with an intense geometrization of space in an attempt, shared by other avant-garde artists, to ‘separate the visual elements of reality’.** This confrontation becomes apparent in the schematic foliage that is repeated in every part of the work, in the essentiality of the intersecting lines with which the greyhounds are drawn, and in the handling of the pose and perspective of the horse, through which multiple planes and volumes are generated which distil the scene into slender lines and elegant arcs that rhythmically structure the architecture of the image. The particular hybridity surrounding this futurist prince, with all of the paradoxes and anachronisms that accompany it, marks a turning point in the deconstruction of Amadeo's personal imagery as a process by which geometric experiments are created, which might explain why Amadeo held this work in such high esteem.

Afonso Ramos

July 2013

 

 

* Cf. Javier Arnaldo (coord.), ¡1914! La Vanguardia y la Gran Guerra, Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2009.

 

** ‘Around 1910, in line with an interpretation whose meaning has never been investigated, first Picasso and Georges Braque, and then Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, followed, a few years later, by […] de Souza-Cardoso, Marcel Duchamp, Picabia, and Filla, devoted themselves to separating the visual elements of reality, using the principle of the rupture of the line adopted by fauvism. Each artist contributed to the development of this general trend.’ – Maurice Raynal, L’Intransigeant, 16 June 1925.