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?