Paint It Blue: Lessons From Pablo Picasso’s Former Guitarist

Consider Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist.” A smaller scale work in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, I have looked at this painting since moving here to study art and philosophy over thirty years ago. I felt an intimate connection from the moment I first saw it, perhaps because of the painting’s implicit reflection on my own situation as a young artist.

Painted in the last weeks of 1904, it was made at a time when many artists were closely following the successive rebellions against art institutions that defined the secession movements of the late 18th to 19th centuries. Inspired initially by the French Revolution, many modernist choices by artists such as Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt were considered obscene by the Academy and state administration, which in earlier eras would otherwise have determined their success or failure as active artists. In many ways, rejecting these institutions meant risking losing one’s livelihood, as it still does today.

Picasso was aware, literally as well as in visual vocabulary, of many of these movements from the time that “The Old Guitarist” intersects with. “The Blue Period, as I see it anyway, establishes him as an important figure, despite being extremely young,” says Elizabeth Cowling, professor of art history at the University of ‘Edinburgh and a leading authority on Picasso, who wrote several books on the artist and held several exhibitions, including at the Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York and elsewhere. “As you probably know, he sold many of these Blue Period paintings, and subsequent Rose Period paintings to Ambrose Vollard, the dealer who also purchased Cubist works, exhibited some of the Cubist sculptures and contributed to launch Picasso’s career. I don’t think Blue Period paintings as such were particularly influential, but I think they established him as an important figure. Once He Painted’ Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ and continues with cubism, this is where he becomes really influential.

“He himself dismissed the blue period work as too sentimental, and I think he is right,” says Cowling. But he was a very sentimental artist and that’s one side of his work that I find interesting, and extremism is interesting. It’s a very important painting, there’s no doubt about it, and it’s interesting how important this early work was in maintaining its popularity. I remember as a child I was interested in the work of Picasso, and it was based on the images of the blue period and the rose period. There were a lot of little publications, little cheap books with color plates that I collected as a kid, and they were from that period. I liked the feeling. I liked the fact that I could see the footage of the tragedy, it was easy to read, it spoke very directly and I wasn’t aware, because I didn’t have the knowledge, that he was tapping into his admiration for El Greco in this period. I didn’t know anything about it and didn’t realize it was part of a whole movement, but I found it very appealing, and I think that time period remains appealing to a lot of people. He stands out very clearly – it’s Picasso – and they can identify him, and I think it’s the first moment in his career where you have that sense of a particular style. It is the first style among many that Picasso worked on during his long career.

Although Picasso had not yet visited Germany, the artists of “Die Brücke” (The Bridge) were aware of his work and incorporated it into their own to further German Expressionism’s characteristic use of increased colors and representations of free sexuality. Later, Picasso would exhibit as a member of the group “Der Blaue Reiter” (“The Blue Rider”) alongside Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and others. A favorite of many of these artists, the color blue was almost a mystical force.

“It’s pre-Cubist, of course, but the iconographic motif will become central in his later work,” says WJT Mitchell, professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago and editor for more than four decades of the university journal. art, culture and politics, Critical Inquiry. “Why? I am tempted to treat it as a synesthetic motif, meant to emphasize the interplay of sound and sight in the arts. And when it begins to appear in Cubist works, it becomes even more insistent on the third sense – touch – which is not just a matter of skeletal fingers, but the way the strings and body of the guitar emerge from the most abstract paintings like features of the tactile surface.

Perhaps a synesthesia caused by the traumas of precariousness and poverty? And the widely noted influence of the untimely death of his friend Carles Casagemas, who shot himself in the head at a dinner party for a failed romance. I had no more than a vague idea of any of this at the time, but I was about the same age as Picasso when he painted it when I first met “The Old Guitarist” times and, similarly, I had also had an artist friend commit suicide by jumping off a roof the previous year, during my freshman year of art school in Savannah, Georgia. I wrote about the experience for my hometown newspaper just before I moved to Chicago, two years younger than Picasso when he painted “The Old Guitarist” and similarly living without a safety net, in a new city without a family, without any means of support, anonymous, a bit like the artist in his early twenties, when he first settled in Barcelona, at a time of great economic crisis for the country .

There is an intensity to these real moments of grief and loss that come through. “I think it’s like a number of other works he produced around the same time in 1903-04, they’re very extreme,” Cowling says. “They take El Greco and run with it, and push the style that he had developed over the last few years to an extreme level and I think what he was doing with a lot of these poor figure paintings – the blind, the figures ascetics, beggars – I think he very consciously produces a series, a series of secular saints if you will, who are the secular equivalent of the religious figures you would see in a church, decorated entirely by an artist like El Greco, we almost imagine them in a succession of chapels, these figures.

The notion of artists struggling to do their job while coping with the overwhelming pressures of everyday survival, particularly resonant to me at the time, is particularly relevant to this discussion of “The Old Guitarist.” Just like in the aftermath of Secession, artists were left to fend for themselves without the support of the state or the Academy and the vast majority of the gallery system – you don’t hang “Le 3 mai 1808” de Goya above the sofa, after all, entering the avant-garde required self-awareness and sacrifice.

It’s especially relevant now, at a time when we’re rethinking these age-old issues of economic inequality, with places like New York launching the largest guaranteed income program for working artists in the country, an ambition that Chicago continues to miss. of. There’s something to be said for arguments that funding the arts is important to maintaining a healthy democracy in an age when politicians like Trump still see no harm in using Hitler’s favorite term “criticism.” art” when discussing contemporary artists such as Chris. Ofili’s work as “absolutely gross and degenerate stuff”.

I don’t have much hope that American society will ever find value in funding art as a matter of cultural democracy, as most other advanced nations do. Yet an empathy for personal and economic trauma may have been part of background intentionality, Mitchell speculates. “The guitar is held, embraced, and I always had the feeling that Picasso wanted to produce a kind of liberalization of the spectator like the one that holds and is held by the painting itself. He clearly returns to the picture repeatedly and compulsively, usually in the setting of an interior with a window.

Iconology of a reason for hope? Maybe. For me, it had an emotional resonance that persists stubbornly to this day. For Cowling, the influence of the series also widens the artist’s loop: “Over the whole of his career, I think the blue period is interesting in relation to his own work, because it seems to return to this extremism of emotion and El Greco when he is a very old man – especially in prints and drawings – where we find almost pastiches of El Greco’s work. I’m talking now about the 1960s and 1970s, when he’s very old and living a lot from his memory, and that kind of expressionism that you find in the blue period is also very strong in that late period as well. I think he then becomes an influence on his own work.

This confusion of beginning and end is disheartening, in that when you go through art history so thoroughly, you come back to yourself, part of the mystery you started long ago, with all the wonder and heightened senses of youth and struggle. In this moment of looking, in this feeling of remembering who you were when you started out in the world, you are once again imbued with this hope of leaving a mark, of seeing, in yourself, in your work, in all things we have learned, lost and lived, how far you still have to go.