Research on Blue Period of Picasso

One of Picasso’s best friends Casagemas was a troubled soul, in love with a girl called Germaine who didn’t love him, and drinking heavily.  One night in 1901, Casagemas has decided he had enough of Paris, so he invited Germaine and a bunch of friends to farewell dinner in a café.  After they had drunk several bottles of wine, Casagemas stood up, and he gave an incoherent, slurry speech in French, and then suddenly, he pulled a pistol from one pocket and aimed it at Germaine and fired.  Luckily, she sensed what was coming, ducked down, and the bullet grazed her neck.  But then, to the horror of all his friends and customers, Casagemas swiveled the revolver round to his own temple and pulled the trigger.  He was dead within an hour. 

The death of his greatest friend devastated Picasso, and his sorrow permeated his art.  For the next few years, Casagemas would appear regularly in Picasso’s works, and most significantly of all, he began to paint almost exclusively in blue. He depicted outcasts, isolation and despair, as if that was all that he could see.  But his misery led to his first distinct style, now known as his Blue Period.

Although still relatively classical, he was painting from the heart, using blue to express profound emotion, rather than just accurately coping reality.  The sorrowful power of these paintings would capture imaginations far beyond the world of art, but did Picasso play a part in defining blue as the color of sadness?  While blues music actually came first, Picasso did influence jazz legend Miles Davis, who released an album called Blue Period in 1951.  Author Richard Williams has written about the influence of the color blue in modern times, he thinks the Blue Period paintings were very important in establishing the meaning of blue for the 20^th century in art and culture.  Miles, as a jazz musician, would have grown up playing the blues.  It was the first thing he learned how to play.  Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, the most popular jazz album of all time.  Just before he made this record, on another record he made with his great friend and collaborator, the composer and arranger Gil Evans, Gil Evans had written a piece for him called Blues for Pablo.  We can be pretty sure that the Pablo in question was Pablo Picasso, and in that sense, this was his blue period.  So blue really was the color of the 20^th century.

The Death of Casagemas, 1901

Woman in a Shawl, 1902

Woman with Folded Arms, 1902

The Tragedy, 1903

 La Celestine (Women with a cataract), 1904

Portrait of Jamie Sabart, 1901

Autoportrait, 1901

Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, 1904

Self Portrait 

The Old Guitarist, 1903

The Old Jew (Blind old man and boy), 1903

At the end of 1901, the description of Paris nightlife, the cityscapes of Montmartre, disappeared from Picasso’s paintings and the bright colors of the paintings of 1900 and 1901 were replaced by a monochrome with subtle tonalities. Blue became the dominant color in his work, so much so that the paintings he did between 1901 and 1904 are defined by that color.

That emergence of that change in subject matter and color in Picasso’s work was neither sudden nor arbitrary; the influence of circumstantial, cultural, social and personal factors determined the step from a worldly painting to one of a strongly symbolic character.

One of the decisive circumstances in the coming of that blue period was Picasso’s friendship with Max Jacob, who introduced him to Baudelaire, Rimbaud and most of all Verlaine. He discovered a type of literature in which sincerity in inseparable from pain; in which the art springs from sadness and suffering.

With the passage of time, blue came to monopolise the compositions, while an atmosphere of mystery, sadness and melancholy pervaded most of the paintings.  Blue has literary associations with decadence and is considered a highly spiritual color.  When combined with green, it suggests the immense loneliness of the sea, and for that reason Picasso often uses blue when there is no naturalistic reason to do so.  With that correlation between sadness and sincerity, the world of outcasts takes on great importance.