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The Blue Period 1901-1904
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Self-Portrait "Yo"
1901
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Picasso's works in the period from 1898 to 1901 were most diverse
in character; it was plainly a time when he was getting his bearings,
as is confirmed by the fact that he was forever examining the creative
principles of contemporary progressive art. His examination was a
deliberate and selective process; one of Picasso's great abilities was
his discernment of the strengths and weaknesses of new artistic
movements, his gift for borrowing what he could use. As a pupil he had
early on perceived the shortcomings of academic art and realised that
it was irreconcilable with his own convictions; now, similarly, he saw
the dead ends of the avant-garde, the tendency of art nouveau
to use superficial ornamentation and stiff linearity, the vapid
esotericism of symbolism. In the year 1901 Picasso was already in a
position to make a response and create something new of his own - the
long series of works known as his Blue Period.
The term places in the foreground the monochrome tendency of the
work. It is striking, certainly; but merely to identify the colouring
is to say little. Nowadays the pictures are valued for their
accessible formal repertoire, which has a unified, homogeneous quality
to it; but the fact is that they are by no means simple, but rather
products of complex, multi-layered artifice. They constitute no less
than a resume of European artistic progress since the mid-19th century
- though Picasso did forgo the newly-discovered potential of colour.
In this respect he was diametrically at odds with Fauvism, which
flourished at the same time. So his contemporaries had initial
difficulties making out the intention and value of Picasso's work.
Picasso could of course have gone about things an easier way: a lesser
talent would have been satisfied with what had been achieved so far
and would have continued turning out art that spelled success with the
public.
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Though the fundamentals of the Blue Period were evolved in Paris,
Barcelona remained the centre of Picasso's actual labours till he
finally moved to the French capital in April 1904. In fact his work in
Catalonia was interrupted only by a brief (and commercially dismal)
stay in Paris from October 1902 to January 1903. His pictures, not
merely melancholy but profoundly depressed and cheerless, inspired no
affection in the public or in buyers. Picasso had broken with Manach,
and his financial position was very bad indeed. The report that
Picasso even burnt a large number of his drawings for heating that
winter may be mere legend, but in terms of the art market he was
certainly in the cold. And this isolation continued till 1905, when
collectors began to take an interest in his work of the Blue and Rose
Periods. It was not poverty that led him to paint the impoverished
outsiders of society, but rather the fact that he painted them made
him poor himself. But he was neither lonely nor in critical straits.
He was still an important figure in the Catalan scene. And he had his
foothold in the Parisian Spanish community, and met new friends who
consolidated his position, such as the writer Max Jacob.
To understand Picasso's circumstances at that time helps us not
only to grasp his life but also to grasp his subject matter. The
beggars, street girls, alcoholics, old and sick people, despairing
lovers, and mothers and children, all fit the despondent mood of the
Blue Period so perfectly that it is as if Picasso had invented them.
But of course all he invented was his treatment; otherwise he was
squarely in the avant-garde line of development since the mid-!9th
century. The relinquishment of academic ideals and of the traditional
valuations placed on supposedly higher or lower kinds of art, and the
new stress that was placed on autonomy of form, had by no means
implied indifference to content. It was just that content had changed.
The subjects now considered fit to paint were different ones.
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Angel Fernandez de Soto with a Woman
1902
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Picasso's early work often included erotic or downright pornographic
scenes. In old age he returned to these themes, though not till then.
It is not so much a reflection of Picasso's own life in a promiscuous
milieu (though it is that too) as an extension of basically political
convictions. Taboos set up by mindless social convention are breached
by the freedom of art.
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Angel Fernandez de Soto at a Cafe
1903
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Two Figures and a Cat
1902
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The Mackerel
1902
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Gustave Courbet's realism located subjects in everyday village
life. Courbet liked to give plain physical work the full monumental
treatment, knowing the subject had hitherto not been taken seriously.
In Honore Daumier's drawings, society's weaknesses were lampooned, but
Daumier also took the lives of smiths, butchers or washerwomen
seriously in paintings and graphic art that owed no slavish debt to
any classical norm. And Impressionism, of course, would be radically
misunderstood if we saw it purely as formal virtuosity, games played
with colour, and atmospherics. Impressionism has all this to offer,
but more too: the Impressionists did not only paint sunny landscapes,
or scenes recorded in the moods of different seasons or times of day,
they also discovered the modern city as a source of subjects. If they
recognised no hierarchy of formal values, they also knew no precedence
of subjects. There were no taboos in their approach to the new
reality, no refusal to face subjects that were beneath their dignity.
Smoke-filled railway stations and cathedrals, boulevard life in Paris
and night clubs and the gloom of drinkers and whores, all appeared in
their work. The revolution in form was accompanied by a revolution in
subject matter. Their position as artistic outsiders prompted them to
examine social realities.
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Couple in Cafe
1903
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Picasso's Blue Period portrayals of beggars and prostitutes,
workers and drinkers in bars, took up this line. His absinthe drinkers
had antecedents in Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec." And the Pier-reuse
staring dreamily into nowhere was of course a street girl. Many
similar compositions followed from 1901 to 1904. Often they had
thematic links to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, and links in terms of
monumental treatment to Courbet, who - influenced by the revolutionary
thinking of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - had dared as early as 1856 to
make two prostitutes by the Seine the subject of a large-scale
painting. Picasso's arresting "Woman Ironing" was also a
product of a recent tradition, with affinities to works by Daumier and
Degas.
Of course it was not only the visual arts that were in flux.
Political, philosophical and cultural thinking were expressed in
literary form. Along with the work of Proudhon, there were the novels
of the Naturalist Emile Zola. "Nana" in particular, the story of a
prostitute, was well known, indeed notorious. Just as Edouard Manet
painted a "Nana" himself (Hamburg, Kunsthalle), so too Baudelaire and
Zola responded to the new art in writing.
We should also remember that the Paris milieu was not the sole
influence on Picasso's Blue Period. Spanish culture played a
considerable part too. After the 1868 revolution, which had led to a
short-lived democratic republic, social injustice became a concern of
Spanish art and writing too. Of the various ideas that were imported
into the country, anarchism was particularly influential; the
Barcelona literary and artistic circles Picasso moved in were very
interested in the tenets of anarchism, albeit in conjunction with
other ideas too. A self-portrait Picasso painted in the winter of
1901/1902 captures the mood. It is as if Dostoyevsky's novels,
Nietzsche's ideas and the theories of Mikhail Bakunin had stood
godfather to the painting.
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Self-Portrait with Cloak
1901
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The "Modernista" painters and the post-modernists, foremost among
them Nonell, used their work to explore social conditions following
the collapse of the Spanish colonial empire and the consequent
deterioration of the country's economic situation. Santiago Rusifiol
used a subtle symbolism to describe Spain's ailing condition, painting
dead and withered gardens time after time. Casas and Nonell, on the
other hand, painted work that responded directly to political events
and the miseries of the lower classes. Thus in 1894 Casas painted the
public execution of anarchist bomber Santiago Salvador, while Nonell
did numerous studies and paintings of slum life, men crippled in war,
and social outcasts. Together with Soler, Picasso had pursued radical
ideas in "Arte Joven"; he attached especial importance to the writer
Pio Baroja, whose tales lamented the lot of casual labourers and the
unemployed. The influence of anarchist literature and of Nonell's
socio-critical art is apparent in many of Picasso's works of 1899 and
1900. But his new style of the Blue Period neither simply continued
this line nor conformed with his sources. His formal approach was
different for a start. Whereas Nonell (and Picasso himself in his
"Arte Joven" days) had done compositions involving several figures and
having a narrative character, the Blue Period works established just a
handful of emphatic motifs. In Nonell's panoramic works, human misery
was seen as a slice of real life in its real environment and implied
comment on larger societal conditions. But in Picasso's case fate was
an individual thing, endured in isolation.
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"The Absinthe Drinker", an emotionally arresting painting,
draws its power from this. Everything seems stony: the glass, the
bottle, the woman herself. A sense of volume is conveyed by
juxtaposing variant tones of the same colour within purely linear
spaces. Spatial values are produced less by perspective than by the
overlapping of forms. It is a meticulous, clear, balanced composition,
with lighter and darker echoes of the skin tonalities unifying the
effect. The tonal differences are so slight that the impression
borders on the monochrome, serving solely to intensify the atmospheric
charge. The draughtsman's forms make a more powerful impact than the
painter's colouring. The long, talon-like hands gripping the angular
face and upper arm, with the overall elongation of proportions, serve
to emphasize the isolation and introspectiveness of the sitter.
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The Absinthe Drinker
1901
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"Crouching Beggar" shows Picasso developing his new
stylistic resources. The crouching woman, cloaked in a blanket, her
form contoured with flowing, forceful lines, is seen in some
indeterminate location established by the mere indication of spatial
levels. Blues of various kinds predominate. Even the ochre-brown
blanket and the sallow face are shadowed with blue. The brushwork
still juxtaposes thick and even, abrupt and smooth, as in the previous
Paris paintings.
But the Blue Period Picasso did not merely pursue one-sided
variations of an expressive approach. He produced very varied work,
monumental, smoothly-constructed pieces alternating with detailed work
the brushwork of which is nervy and dabbed. It is not only an art of
considerable artifice, it is also an art which portrays an artificial
world. For Picasso, confrontation with social reality was only a
motivation; it was not an end in itself. For him it was more important
to experiment, to try and test new visual approaches.
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Crouching Beggar
1902
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In "The Absinthe Drinker" the subject is not only the melancholy
pub atmosphere and the dreariness of alcohol. The painting's meaning
also lies in the autonomy of formal means. The erosion of defined
spatiality, the abandoning of perspective construction, is only the
most striking of several interesting features. It must be taken
together with the accentuation of compositional fundamentals such as
plenitude and emptiness, density and weight, emphasis and its lack.
Picasso's composition uses three levels, the narrowest strip (contrary
to usual practice) being the bottommost. It is also the brightest and
thus, despite its weightless narrowness, nonetheless possesses force
and presence.
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Prostitutes in a Bar
1902
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The other main motifs are similarly treated. The woman is seated to
the right, but turned to the left in such a way that her head and
cupped hand establish a vertical axis that is not quite the centre
line of the composition but nevertheless roughly corresponds to the
traditional golden section. This axis is also at odds with the
vertical of the picture edge. The woman is not in the geometrical
centre, but the figure does link the upper and lower zones with a
certain weight, creating a stable tension between them. The bottle and
glass echo this function.
If "The Absinthe Drinker" is thus a textbook work of eccentric
composition, in "Crouching Beggar" Picasso emphasizes compositional
centrality to express the woman's self-absorbed state. She is
crouching right on the central vertical axis, the turns of her body
turning about it. Solid motifs, with spatially flat planes in the
background, convey a sense of fullness and emptiness.
Ex-centricity and centralization were constants in this period.
"The Blind Man's Meal" has a blind man up against the right
of the composition, reaching across the table with unnaturally
elongated arms, so that the rest of the picture seems somehow to be in
his embrace or province. The radically monochromatic blue is married
to a kind of formal crisscross procedure: the composition uses
striking echo techniques, the pallor in the blind man's neck answered
by parts of the table, the paler blue patches on his clothing
corresponding to the pale blues on the rear wall.
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The Blind Man's Meal
1903
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The Old Jew (Blind Old Man and Boy)
1903
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Though there is no clear line of evolution, certain Blue Period
motifs and formal groupings do recur. In essence, Picasso was working
within a limited range: men and women seated at tables, alone or in
twos, meals being eaten, figures crouching or hugging themselves as
they stand or sit, people with head in hand or arms crossed - this
modest repertoire, in variations, accounts for the Blue Period work.
Of course, if there were no more to it, those with no prior
interest would no longer have any particular reason to be interested
in these pictures. In fact Picasso was a master of intensifying
contrast and evocative effects. His mastery came from his assured
grasp of certain formal and thematic antecedents, and of the various
media (such as drawing, graphics or paint). One of his earliest
etchings was "The Frugal Repast", done in 1904 and one of the
masterpieces of 20th-century printed graphic art. In it, Picasso's
approach to line etching resembles his handling of colour tones in the
paintings.
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The Frugal Repast
1904
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Velvety black zones fade to grey and to bright clarity. As in
"The Blind Man's Meal" Picasso plays with formal correspondences; but
the cylindrical thinness of the arms, the elongated spread fingers,
and the bony angularity of the figures with their dark and light
areas, all recall El Greco. Not that the conspicuous influence of El
Greco was the only presence in the Blue Period. It was not only the
distortion of proportion that gave expressive force to these
monochrome works, but also the grand, decorative linearity, a legacy
of art nouveau and dialectically related to the subjects of the
works. Monumentally conceived, solitary, emotionally intense figures,
of course, were also standard fare in Symbolist art.
It is surely true that Picasso absorbed the influence of major
artists such as Edvard Munch. But another important influence was the
minor French painter Eugene Carriere, who was well-known in Barcelona.
A friend of Picasso's, Sebastian Junyent, was a pupil of Carriere, and
Casas had earlier attended a Paris art school where Carriere taught.
His monochrome pictures using only a very few figures plainly
influenced Picasso's numerous mother-and-child works. Other artists
also influenced Picasso's monochrome style.
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Jeanne (Female Nude)
1901
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Indeed, it was a widely followed approach at the turn of the
century, used by Symbolists, Impressionists and even Classicists. As
well as Carriere's grey-brown paintings there were Pierre Puvis de
Chavanne's allegorical works and James Abbott McNeill Whistler's tonal
studies in blue and rose, seen in a large-scale Paris exhibition soon
after the artist's death in 1903.
The colour blue was important in these experiments, and indeed, as
we shall see, its meaning had a history. Its melancholy mood was often
discussed in theoretical writings on art and in literature at the
time. Painter-poet Rusinol, one of the leading Catalan "Modernistas",
published a short Symbolist tale, "El patio azul" (The Blue
Courtyard), in the 10 March 1901 issue of Soler and Picasso's magazine
"Arte Joven". The main character is a painter engaged in trying to
capture the melancholy atmosphere of a courtyard surrounded by houses.
In the process he meets a consumptive girl, who dies when he finishes
his painting. Shortly after, in his studio at Boulevard de Clichy 130
in Paris, Picasso painted "The Blue Room". He was joining the
debate on the significance of the colour.
Blue not only denotes melancholy; it also carries erotic charges.
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The Blue Room
1901
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The Blue Glass
1903 |
And it has a long tradition in Christian symbolic iconography, in
which it stands for the divine. German Romanticism gave blue the task
of representing the transcendent ("The Blue Flower"),
albeit in secular fashion. Ever since the first third of the 19th century
there had been a regular mania for blue, as it were, which peaked in
1826 in the tourist discovery of the Blue Grotto on Capri. As early as
1810, Goethe had advocated the use of dominant colours to set moods:
blue light could be used for mourning, and one could look at one's
surroundings through tinted glass in order to marshal divergent
colours in a single tonality. In 1887 the French Symbolist painter
Louis Anquetin actually adopted this method.
Picasso's "The Visit" shows how consciously he was
gathering these traditional values into a new synthesis. The attitudes
and gestures of the figures are straight from Christian iconography.
The visitation of Mary was portrayed in this way; and blue is the colour symbolically associated with the Virgin, the Queen of Heaven.
But Picasso was also at work on personal material in the painting. The
women's heads are covered, as they are in many of his paintings of
that period - and as they were at the women's prison of St. Lazare in
Paris, to which Picasso had access in 1901 through a doctor he knew.
It was an old building, in essence a converted 17th-century convent,
and nuns of the Order of St. Joseph did the work of warders. Solitary
confinement was a favourite punishment, though mothers were allowed to
be with their children. It was a dismal place, full of women whose
fates were desolate; and it made a profound impression on the young
Spanish artist. It was no coincidence that he chose the visitation,
the meeting of Mary with the mother of John the Baptist, as a way of
recording that impression. We have it from Picasso himself that "The
Visit" shows an inmate and a nun, deliberately portrayed in equal
fashion to emphasize their existential equality. Many of the
mother-and-child pictures he painted at the time were affected by what
he saw at St. Lazare too.
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The Visit
1902
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The Blue Period peaked in "La Vie (Life)", a major
composition which Picasso completed in May 1903. In many respects it
is not only the major work of this phase but also the very sum of
Picasso's art.
At first the structure seems straightforward,
but in fact the history and message of the painting are complex. There
are two groups of people, an almost naked couple and a mother with a
sleeping babe, separated by half the picture's breadth. Between them
we can see two pictures leaning against the wall, the lower showing a
crouching person with head on knee, the upper - a kind of variant on
the other - a man and woman crouching and holding each other. The top
right corner of the upper picture has been cut off diagonally and
slightly unevenly; it makes the impression of a study pinned up on the
wall. The overall impression is of an artist's studio, so that we are
tempted to see it as a representation of the life of the artist.
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La Vie (Life)
1903
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But neither the subject nor the import of the work is easy to
interpret. It is too fractured; nothing is what it seems, neither the
place nor the people nor the action. Though the lovers at left seem
intimate, their gestures are not. There is no trace of eye contact in
the painting; all the characters are looking past one another into
vacancy, with a melancholy air. They are not involved in a single
action. And there are at least two different planes of reality.
And the location itself remains undefined, uncertain. The
perspective angles are at odds with one another, the architectonic
details ambiguous. It is an unreal and contradictory place, finally
inaccessible to explanation, and the dominant blue even introduces a
note of menace. Picasso has used Blue Period compositional techniques
we can see in various pictures in one single, intense piece; and the
same is true of his subjects. The embrace, seen here in a number of
variations, was standard Picasso from 1900 to 1904, as was the mother
and child, and the crouching posture. "La Vie" is a kind of pastiche
of Picasso's Blue Period; yet it is no mere assemblage - rather, it is
carefully planned, and its formal qualities and subject matter owed
nothing to chance. Picasso did a number of instructive preliminary
studies which show that a couple in a painter's studio were at the
very heart of the composition from the start.
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The other group, though, was only gradually fixed, and Picasso
plainly first planned to position a bearded man at the right.
Initially he gave the man standing with the woman his own features, as
if the painting were of an autobiographical nature. Not till he was at
work on the canvas did he make the decisive changes. But those changes
themselves were directly related to matters in his own life. The man
became his sometime friend Carlos Casagemas, who committed suicide in
Paris in the year 1901 while Picasso was back in Spain. His
unfulfilled passion for a young woman named Germaine, who was a model
and lover for many in the Catalan artists' community, triggered his
suicide. When Germaine spurned his affection, Carlos Casagemas tried
first to kill her and then took his own life in the presence of a
number of horrified friends.
When Picasso heard the news in Spain, he was deeply affected. That
same year he started to paint works that dealt with the dead man and
his own relations with him. They were fictive, heavily symbolic
paintings showing the dead Casagemas laid out, or even allegorically
representing his funeral, attended by whores and the promiscuous
sinners of Montmartre. The fact that Picasso returned to Casagemas in the great 1903 composition means that the existential
impact on him was profound. The biographical and non-personal strands
in the work are in fact fully interwoven. During his first ever visits
to Paris, Picasso led a bohemian life of drinking and sexual
promiscuity with his Spanish friends. His life style was partly a
protest against conventionality in art and in life. The end of his
friend Casagemas brought home to Picasso what was wrong with that
life-style.
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The Death of Casagemas
1901
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The Death of Casagemas
1901
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Furthermore, Picasso's painting was in line with an artistic
preoccupation of the times. The subjects of early death, despair of
one's vocation, and suicide were frequently dealt with, and much
discussed in Barcelona's artistic circles. Whether the allegorical
dimension implied in the title by which we now know the painting was
intended is doubtful, since the title was not given by Picasso. The
treatment of the figures goes beyond the typical attitudes of
metaphoric figures; yet manifestly they are close kin to Symbolic art.
Casagemas stood for Picasso himself - who had originally portrayed
himself in the picture and included the unambiguous motif of the
easel. X-ray examination has revealed, furthermore, that Picasso used
a canvas on which something had already been painted - and not just
any canvas, but in fact his painting "Last Moments", seen at the Paris
World Fair in 1900 and in other words a thematically and
biographically extremely significant picture.
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Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas)
1901
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It is idle to want to read an exact message into "La Vie". Yet
Picasso's meaning is clear enough. All that mattered in biographical,
artistic, creative and thematic terms in those years is present in
this one picture. The melancholy and existential symbolism of that
period in Picasso's life are richly expressed in this ambitious work.
Picasso's technique of veiling the painting's meaning is in fact
one of its signal qualities. He has managed to sidestep the vapidness
of one-sided allegory; we are involved in this painting, drawn into it
and - meditatively - into ourselves. The process opens up entirely new
dimensions to historical painting.
Looking back, we can see the Blue Period works as a progression
towards this goal, even though they were not specific preliminary
studies, of course. For the first time we see in Picasso's art
something that will strike us repeatedly in the sequel, a notable
tension between the autonomy of the single work and the endeavour to
gather the fruits of a line of development into one sum. "La Vie" is
the first of a number of Picassos that stand out from the oeuvre by
virtue of unusual formal and thematic complexity and an extraordinary
genesis. The painting was both an end and a beginning: it was a
prelude to paintings even more strictly monochromatic in their use of
atmospheric blue and even more concerned with existential depths. The
smooth, vast surfaces of the backgrounds, the clear structure pared
down to the essentials, and the unifying contour, are all apt to the
isolation of the figures - in other words, are cued by considerations
of subject; yet still, Picasso is increasingly interested in other
matters. Linear contour acquires an almost decorative flavour. Picasso
tries out ways of concentrating formal options. He is plainly about to
embark on something new.
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