The Trussed Rooster

‘Some of Picasso’s most passionate statements as a painter were delivered in shades of black, shite, and gray. Chromatically and iconographically, The Trussed Rooster belongs to a succession of large grisaille canvases that explore the interconnected themes of suffering, sacrifice, and slaughter. The best-known of these is Guernica, executed in 1937 in outrage and protest against the horrors of aerial bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. Seven years later, as the atrocities of the Second World War came to light, Picasso made another mural-sized response to mass murder, The Charnel House (fig. 1). Later still, in 1951, the killing of civilians in North Korea incited he artist once again to register shocking violence in a predominantly grayscale palette (Massacre in Korea; Muséee national Picasso-Paris). These three figural compositions proclaimed Picasso’s political sympathies in explicit visual terms: terrified faces, dismembered corpses, and armed executioners.

His still lifes, however, tend to speak in the coded language of symbol and metaphor, and in that sense they recall the tradition of Spanish bodegon painting in which painstaking depictions of food and cookware became pretexts for moral reflections on human nature [1]. Roosters are a recurring and multivalent metaphor in Picasso’s art, from his early years through the final phase of his life.

Fig. 1: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). The Charnel House, 1944-45. The Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala Florence © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025

In some works he used the bird as a proud and preening emblem of the French republic, in others as a helpless figure of frailty and death. Its significance here becomes clearer when The Trussed Rooster is considered alongside The Restaurant of 1914, since the two paintings denote the beginning and the end of a culinary process that requires sacrificial violence. Before it can become the object of gourmet pleasure seen in the cubist canvas, the animal must be butchered, bled, and stripped of feathers. In The Trussed Rooster, these common kitchen tasks stand for the basic brutality of human existence and survival.

Hence the brutalism of Picasso’s technique, draining the canvas of color just as the rooster is drained of life, and allowing his diluted pigments to drip downward in the direction of the blood bowl and poultry knife at bottom left. The crude chair assumes an eerie anthropomorphic quality by holding the trussed rooster in its lap, as it were, much like the female subject of a 1938 painting who strangely resembles the artist (fig. 2). The lamp and lightbulb overhead reference similar motifs that illuminate the carnage in Guernica, while the rooster’s bound and upturned claws allude to the reaching hand that rises from the mass of dead bodies in The Charnel House. The absence of underdrawing and the rapid application of paint indicate that The Trussed Rooster was a more spontaneous creation than either of those carefully planned compositions. However, the reuse and adaptation of forms from his own oeuvre, so typical of Picasso’s creative process, suggest that its overall structure and content had already taken shape in his mind when he addressed the canvas.

Fig. 2: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Woman with a Cockerel, 1938. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart © bpk / Staatsgalerie Stuttgart © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025

Though it is uncertain whether The Trussed Rooster was inspired by current events in the political sphere, its menacing atmosphere and ponderous implications were lifted when another bird appeared in Picasso’s work a few weeks later, this time carrying a message of hope and good will. The image of a white dove spreading its outstretched wings over a pile of discarded weaponry, which the artist designed in May 1962 for the World Congress for Disarmament and Peace, upcoming that July, would become an anti-war icon as globally recognizable as any of his black and white masterpieces (fig. 3) [2]’ [3].

Fig. 3: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace poster, 1962. Hoover Institution © Hoover Institution. Library and Archives © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025

[1] See ROSENBLUM, Robert. ‘The Spanishness of Picasso’s Still Lifes’. In: BROWN, Jonathan (ed). Picasso and the Spanish Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, pp. 61-93.
[2] ‘Blown up to monumental proportions, it served as backdrop for the congress and appeared as a poster whose text was translated into many languages’. UTLEY, Gertje R. Picasso: The Communist Years. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 128.
[3] Comment by Ross Finocchio in: FITZGERALD, Michael (dir.). Pablo Picasso: Structures of Invention. The Unity of a Life’s Work. [Exh. Cat.: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2024]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2024, pp. 266-269.