Progress Oct02

Progress

Bullfight posters are not hard to come by in Spain. Indeed, in any place in the country with touristic pretensions you can probably find a shop where they’ll inkjet your name on to some simulacrum of a traditional bullfight poster such that to the untrained eye it will look as though you yourself, alongside some José Tomás and Such-and-Such de la Frontera, were one of the three brave matadors who stared death in the eyes in Plaza de Toros de Madrid back in some timeless past and lived into the Disneyfied present to tell of it (what these posters in fact announce, of course, is that you or someone who cared enough about you to buy you a gift visited Spain). With its flick-of-the-wrist abstractions, and the bull about to enter the ring as though at the edge of some kind of black hole – with the blood-red text streaked, near the bottom, as though with blood – the image above, created by contemporary Majorcan artist Miquel Barceló, hardly resembles the iconic bullfight posters from which the aforementioned souvenirs take their folkloric cues. All the same, it is the most beautiful bullfighting poster I have ever seen, because the bullfight it was created to promote – on the 25th of September at the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona – was the last bullfight ever held in Catalonia. * I am no bullfighting expert. But having spent probably a quarter of my adult life in Spain, and a fair percentage of that time heading up groups of American high school students who naturally can’t go back home without having seen a Spanish bullfight, I’ve been to enough to know the basic script. Each bullfight features three matadors and six bulls, each of which gets...