Picasso's Blue Period

“I began to paint in blue,” Pablo Picasso wrote, explaining the origins of his Blue Period, “when I learned that Casagemas had died.” Carlos Casagemas was a painter whom Picasso had met in 1899 at Els Quartre Gats (The Four Cats), a café in Barcelona. The two Spaniards traveled to Paris in 1900 and opened a studio together in Montmartre, eking out a living as artists and visiting brothels where Picasso would paint murals on the establishment’s walls in exchange for services. But Casagemas lacked Picasso’s swaggering sense of self; when Carlos was rejected by a woman he loved, he shot himself with a pistol at The Hippodrome Café on February 17, 1901.

Picasso was in Barcelona at the time, but when he returned to Paris, he channeled his grief into his work, choosing the color favored by turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists as well as that most closely associated with melancholy. Picasso’s subjects were outcasts: prostitutes, prisoners, beggars, drunks, laundresses, one-eyed old women, emaciated street musicians. But bourgeois Parisians didn’t want to be reminded of these ghoulish figures from the lower depths—despite the revolution of Impressionism, the art world still prized a prettified classicism—and so the melancholy, monochromatic pictures went unsold. Picasso became so poor he couldn’t afford to buy paints, and even had to burn his canvases in order to stay warm in his garret on the Rue Voltaire. But the young artist was not to be deflected from his quest. He continued to paint in blue, sometimes working the features of Casagemus into portraits of his friends, but rarely, for the next three years, adding other colors.

More than a hundred years later, JPEGS of Blue Period paintings can be downloaded from dozens of Internet sites, posters of The Old Guitarist turn up in coffee shops and college dorms. (My friend, Sarah, remembers putting up The Tragedy, which depicts a poor, desolate family on a seashore, in her dorm room at Mary Washington College in Virginia in the 1970s, and recently my friend, Christine, noticed The Tragedy on the walls of a jewelry store owned by an Indian couple in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.) The pictures haven’t stopped speaking to us. It seems astonishing that a young man barely out of boyhood—he was only 20 in 1901—possessed the empathic intelligence as well as the technical artistry to portray such feeling.

Of course, a young man’s melancholy is a different animal than an old man’s disaffection. And while scholars believe that Picasso probably suffered from a mood disorder for most of his life—which he battled by adopting a killing work ethic as well as a dizzying parade of serial mistresses, who got progressively younger as the decades passed—he never again painted exclusively in blue. In 1904, when he fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a dark-haired model and artist who would bear him his first child, he began to add red to his canvasses, initiating the Rose Period, which, in turn, gave way to the African Period, to Cubism, Classicism, Surrealism, and Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 92, having produced over 50,000 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, tapestries and rugs. He remained lucid until the end—his last words at a dinner party that he and his third wife, Jacqueline Roque, hosted at their château in the south of France were, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”

His astonishing productivity was stunningly evident in “The Last Years, 1963-1973” at the Guggenheim Museum in the winter of 1984. My first husband, Len, and I were among the crowds jostling for spaces to view the exhibit of paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture, which filled most of the museum. In my memory the date feels several years earlier, 1978 or 1979, but perhaps this is because Len and I were both so lighthearted afterward, shedding our cares like winter coats as we bopped down Fifth Avenue to catch the bus to our studio apartment in Greenwich Village, where we stayed in town during the week. (If anyone had said, “In two months, Len will be diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and by the end of December, he’ll be dead, I would have thought they were joking.)

As we dodged patches of snow and ice on that darkening February afternoon, Len and I talked animatedly about what we had seen: the cartoonish line drawings of huge figures with massive breasts and swollen penises engaged in all manner of transgressive activity: peeing, shitting, and copulating. In another era, they would have been branded pornographic, the demented effluvia of a dirty old man, and yet the work had a childlike playfulness that compelled us, energized us. We were amazed that a man in his eighties and nineties still possessed this kind of creative urgency. But maybe not so surprising, Len observed, when you consider what Picasso said after observing a group of schoolchildren in 1956: “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

As I meditate upon that winter afternoon twenty-five years ago, I keep thinking of Bob Dylan’s lines, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Could it be that just as youth is wasted on the young, so depression is mostly a younger person’s affliction, a monochromatic, cyan-colored cloak that the very old, facing the prospect of losing everything including the memory of loss, cannot afford to wear?

Awake for the Blue Hour

One of the curses of middle life is sleeplessness. The brain produces less melatonin, breathing is shallower, dreams are fitful, the bladder cannot hold. One wakes many times, shuffling to the bathroom, or to the kitchen for a midnight snack (sleep experts say that a man of 50 wakes 20 times in the night; a man of 25 only 10 times). Delta sleep (the deepest level of non rapid-eye-movement sleep, where the sleeper cannot be easily roused) becomes as rare as a remembered dream. One turns off the light, and prays for sleep like a child hoping to be visited by the tooth fairy.

But every curse carries its own blessing (at last the midlife mind gets that nothing is ever one thing, that contradiction suffuses every enterprise): one of insomnia’s gifts is the reverie of the blue hour. The blue hour is that time which belongs neither to the night nor to the day; it is when the sky is born again into soft pinks and blues, when the light in the east is as clear as a baby’s urine, when flowers, moist with dew, are said to be at their most fragrant. The French call this time L’Heure Bleue, and even created, in 1912, a perfume called L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. (Odd to think of this legendary perfume, which is still available at $68 for a 1.7 ounce bottle, being created just two years before the outbreak of World War I, when Europe would stink with corpses rotting in the trenches in The Ardennes, Mons, and The Somme.)

Sylvia Plath loved this part of the day, “that blue, almost eternal hour,” as she put it in an interview with the BBC a few months before her death, “before cock crow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.” Plath was writing some of the best poems of her short life during this time. She was living with her children in a flat in London (after Ted Hughes had left her for Assia Wevill) in the house where William Butler Yeats had once lived. There was a blue plaque to mark the spot, a detail Plath records with great excitement in a letter home to her mother, Aurelia, in Massachusetts. Sylvia, who had never failed at anything in her life, was trying to be upbeat, even though her heart was broken. The poems came fast as Plath’s horse, Ariel, and Plath knew they were good, as good as anything by Yeats, but that certitude wasn’t enough to keep her tethered to this world.

She killed herself very early on the morning of February 11, 1963, thrusting her head in an oven, while her two young children slept. History repeated itself forty-six years later during the afternoon of March 23, 2009 with the suicide of her son, Nicholas Hughes, an accomplished fisheries biologist who hung himself with a rope in his home in Fairbanks, Alaska. Hughes was 47, outliving his mother by 17 years. In her announcement to the press, Frieda Hughes said that her brother had been battling depression for many years.

On a memorial website page that the University of Alaska created, one of Nick Hughes’ students recalls how her professor would go out with his students at three in the morning during the summer solstice to observe the salmon and grayling fish in the Chena River.

It is twilight now, evensong instead of matins, the return of the blue hour. The sky is slightly darker like the inside of a mussel shell, the bare branches of the trees wispy as an old woman’s hair, the light clear as a glass of white wine. I say a prayer for Sylvia Plath and her son, Nicholas Hughes, who might still be with us, had they received proper treatment for their depression, whose love for the blue hour endures.

Blue Meds

In the mornings, I swallow pills that cover nearly every hue in the color spectrum: there are oyster shell calcium tablets (green), fish oil supplements (yellow), a multivitamin/multimineral (indigo), a probiotic acidophilus capsule with “14 billion good bacteria” (speckled white, like an egg from a free-range hen).

And let’s not forget the meds: one half-tab of Adderall (cyan blue) and one half-tab of the antidepressant Citalopram (coral pink). The blue meds are a mixture of four amphetamine salts, which I take for attention deficit disorder. (I can be as hyper as a horse that’s been left in the barn all winter, as distractible as a two-year-old motoring from block to block.) ADD is probably the reason I haven’t been able to settle on a career—one week, I contemplate starting a dog-walking business (I’d call it “Who Let the Dogs Out”), and the next I fantasize about working as a clown in a hospital.

But ever since I started taking my precious blue meds (about a year ago), I’ve made steady progress in my off-again-on-again career as a writer. I haven’t earned a dime recently, which makes me worry that I will end up with no teeth living under a bridge, but until then, I’m a happy graphophiliac, writing for my local paper on topics ranging from AIG (where I used to work in corporate communications, years before AIG was called a P.I.G. by the New York Daily News) to the inauguration of Barack Obama to the 123rd anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death (which, if you’re dying to know, is May 15th, 2009).

I looked up Amphetamine on Wikipedia and found that it was first synthesized by a Romanian, Lazar Edeleannu, in Berlin, Germany in 1887. He called it phenylisopropylamine (don’t ask how to pronounce that); apparently, it was one of a series of compounds from the plant derivative ephedrine, which the Chinese had been using for five millennia to treat a host of ailments. (I always knew that the Chinese were smarter than us westerners.) Amphetamines didn’t come into common use until 1929 when American pharmacologist Gordon Alles was searching for an artificial replacement for ephedrine, and tested it on himself. Then the drug company, Smith, Kline and French, got into the game in the mid-1930s and made a bundle marketing it under the trade name Benzedrine.

Amphetamines were the drug of choice for the military during World War II (both the Allies and the Germans liked how the drug lessened combat fatigue as well as increased alertness). It was also the favorite substance of Adolph Hitler, who received daily shots from his doctor of “vitamultine” a combination of methamphetamine and essential vitamins. (I was shocked to discover that der Furher and I liked the same drug; it’s creepy to think that he, too, might have had ADD…)

For nearly the past four decades, amphetamines have been a controlled substance in the United States, which means that my doctor can’t call or fax in the prescription to the pharmacy, but must sign a specially designated form which I must personally surrender to the pharmacist each time I renew the prescription, all of which makes me feel like a Nazi war criminal at Nuremberg whenever I slink into my local CVS.

Sometimes I cut the pills in quarters to make them last longer as well as to reduce their nasty side effects (tachycardia, diarrhea, dizziness, palpitations, arrhythmia--if you read everything on the print outs that accompany each orange vial, you’d be tempted to flush the pills down the toilet). But I am willing to shoulder the risks because my cyan-blue, double-scored meds make me feel, for the first time in my life, confident and hopeful. My blue meds make me believe, in the words of George Eliot (who did not have ADD), that “it’s never too late to be what you might have been.”