Blue Period of Pablo Picasso

Between 1901 and mid-1904, when blue was the predominant colour in his paintings, Picasso moved back and forth between Barcelona and Paris, taking material for his work from one place to the other. For example, his visits to the Women’s Prison of Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1901–02, which provided him with free models and compelling subject matter (The Soup [1902]), were reflected in his depictions of Barcelona street people—blind or lonely beggars and castaways in 1902–03 (Crouching Woman [1902]; Blind Man’s Meal [1903]; Old Jew and a Boy [1903]). The subject of maternity (women were allowed to keep nursing children with them at the prison) also preoccupied Picasso at a time when he was searching for material that would best express traditional art-historical subjects in 20th-century terms.

The move to Paris and the Rose Period

Picasso finally made the decision to move permanently to Paris in the spring of 1904, and his work reflects a change of spirit and especially a response to different intellectual and artistic currents. The traveling circus and saltimbanques became a subject he shared with a new and important friend, Guillaume Apollinaire. To both the poet and the painter those rootless wandering performers (Girl Balancing on a Ball [1905]; The Actor [1905]) became a kind of evocation of the artist’s position in modern society. Picasso specifically made that identification in Family of Saltimbanques (1905), where he assumes the role of Harlequin and Apollinaire is the strongman (according to their mutual friend, the writer André Salmon).

Picasso’s personal circumstances also changed when at the end of 1904 Fernande Olivier became his mistress. Her presence inspired many works during the years leading up to Cubism, especially on their trip to Gosol in 1906 (Woman with Loaves).

Colour never came easily to Picasso, and he reverted to a generally more-Spanish (i.e., monochromatic) palette. The tones of the Blue Period were replaced from late 1904 to 1906 in the so-called Rose Period by those of pottery, of flesh, and of the earth itself (The Harem [1906]). Picasso seems to have been working with colour in an attempt to come closer to sculptural form, especially in 1906 (Two Nudes; La Toilette). His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) and a Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) show that development as well as the influence of his discovery of archaic Iberian sculpture.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Toward the end of 1906 Picasso began work on a large composition that came to be called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). His violent treatment of the female body and masklike painting of the faces (influenced by a study of African art) have made that work controversial. Yet the work was firmly based upon art-historical tradition: a renewed interest in El Greco contributed to the fracturing of the space and the gestures of the figures, and the overall composition owed much to Paul Cézanne’s Bathers as well as to J.-A.-D. Ingres’s harem scenes. The Demoiselles, however—later named to refer to Avignon Street in Barcelona, where sailors found popular brothels—was perceived as a shocking and direct assault: the women were not conventional images of beauty but prostitutes who challenged the very tradition from which they were born. Although he had his collectors by that date (Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein and the Russian merchant Sergey Shchukin) and soon a dealer (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler), Picasso chose to roll up the canvas of the Demoiselles and to keep it out of sight for several years.

In 1908 the African-influenced striations and masklike heads were superseded by a technique that incorporated elements he and his new friend Georges Braque found in the work of Cézanne, whose shallow space and characteristic planar brushwork are especially evident in Picasso’s work of 1909. Still lifes, inspired by Cézanne, also became an important subject for the first time in Picasso’s career. Cubist heads of Fernande include the sculpture Head of a Woman (1909) and several paintings related to it, including Woman with Pears (1909).