On the beach at Golfe-Juan in 1968, Mili captures Picasso reveling in two of his artistic obsessions: the mask and the minotaur, a mythical half-bull, half-man that featured prominently in much of his work. An excerpt from a 1968 special issue of LIFE, devoted entirely to Picasso, describes a typical scene at home: “Putting on a mask is sometimes enough to set Picasso off into a kind of witch-doctor frenzy. He roars and writhes behind his gorilla mask, dances away to the mirror, returns in a rubber devil’s mask to swoop down on his daughter Paloma. Picasso was one of the first European artists to recognize the magic and beauty of African masks, and his own masks show the enduring power of that early influence.”
