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The Rose Period
1904-1906
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The distance conferred by history places things in a new
perspective and enables us to see a pattern in what strikes
contemporaries as chaotic. Picasso is a good example of this.
For some years we have been in the habit of seeing his art of the
years from 1901 to 1906 as a sequence of two periods, the Blue and the
Rose. The terms are prompted by the dominant colours, and their use
arouses certain expectations in us. But Picasso's contemporaries felt
that what we see as two separate things in fact constituted a single
unity. Though they clearly saw his overriding use of pinks, they did
not consider that this justified the distinction of a new period, and
spoke throughout of the Blue Period - as did the artist himself when
looking back. From our point of view the differences are most
striking; but, at the time, nobody felt there to be any notable
departure from the pre-1904 work to that of 1904 to 1906. In reality
there are new departures but there is also common ground, and this is
true both of Picasso's subjects and of formal considerations.
After three years of portraying the poor and needy and lonely,
though, Picasso struck out in new directions. "Woman with a Crow" shows him doing so. It is made entirely of polarities. The
dynamic contour, the contrasting black and red and blue, the large and
small, open and closed forms, the emphasis on the centre plus the
lateral displacement, light juxtaposed with dark and the white paper
gleaming through, the deep black of the crow's plumage against the
woman's chalk-white face - all of these features are extraordinarily
evocative. The figures seem almost engraved. The delicacy of the heads
and the long, slender fingers of the woman emphasize the intimacy of
gesture. It is a decorative picture, a work of arresting grace and
beauty. Painted in 1904, it also records Picasso's new approach: in
the period ahead, he chose subjects to match his newly aestheticized
sense of form.
Connoisseurs and friends recognised as we do now that there was a
unity to Picasso's new realm, and they gave his new phase the label
"Harlequin Period" after a prominent character in the new work. True,
artistes were not new in Picasso in 1905; but now they were likelier
to make solo appearances. The seemingly bright and merry world of the circus and cabaret and street artistes was as
melancholy as that of the Blue Period's beggars and prostitutes and
old people. Melancholy remained the core emotional note; but the form
and message had changed.
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Woman with a Crow
1904
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It is true that the harlequins are outsiders too. But they have
something to compensate for their low social rank - their artistry.
Behind their gloom is great ability. They are downcast yet
self-confident, presenting a dignified counter-image to the Blue
Period's dejected figures passively awaiting their fates. And Picasso
avails himself of their colourful costumes and graceful, decorative
lines to create what can only be created by art: beauty.
It would doubtless be too simplistic to see Picasso's improved
circumstances as the reason for his change from blue tristesse
to rosy-tinted optimism. But they must have played some part. He had
made his final move to France in April 1904, taking a Montmartre
studio on the Place Ravignan in May. It was one of a number in a
barrack-like wooden building nicknamed the "bateau la-voir" from its
similarity to the washboats on the Seine. Like Montmartre as a whole,
it no longer had any central importance in the art scene: the focus
had long shifted to Montparnasse. But in Impressionist days the likes
of a Renoir had worked there. Of course Picasso did not move solely
among the artists of Montmartre and his old Spanish colony friends. He
also knew the literary avant-garde in Paris.
And he was increasingly establishing rewarding contacts with art
dealers and collectors. In 1904 he exhibited at Berthe Weill's
gallery, and in early 1905 he showed his first new pictures of
travelling entertainers at Galerie Serruriere on the Boulevard
Haussmann. He then agreed on terms with Clovis Sagot, a former circus
clown who had set up a gallery in the Rue Laffitte. At this stage
Picasso came to the attention of the wealthy American Leo Stein, and
he and his sister, the Modernist writer Gertrude Stein, bought 800
francs' worth of Picassos. Shortly after, the dealer Ambroise Vollard
even bought 2000 francs' worth. Other collectors such as the Russian
Sergei Shchukin also invested. Picasso's financial situation was
improving noticeably. And his relationship with Fernande Olivier,
which was to last for several years, introduced stability into his
restless private life.
Nonetheless, the Rose Period pictures are not merely records of a
pleasant time in the artist's life. True, he often met other artists
at Pere Frede's jokily named bar, the "Lapin agile", where the
previous generation of artists had already been in the habit of
gathering. And fashion required that one go to Medrano's circus on
Montmartre. But this is the small change of life, and Picasso's
pictures speak plainly of his true concerns. "Woman with a Crow" was a
portrait of Frede's daughter Margot, who really did keep a pet crow.
In "At the "Lapin Agile" the scene is Picasso's favourite bar.
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At the "Lapin agile"
1905
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Frede himself appears as a musician in the back-ground, and the
harlequin is a self-portrait of Picasso. Neither picture, however, is
a straight representation of everyday reality. The woman with the crow
is not so much a portrait as a type study, stylized beyond
individuality. And in the bar scene Picasso is varying an approach he
had used in his Blue Period for works such as "The Absinthe Drinker".
In the new painting too, the people are gazing listlessly into
vacancy, their bearing expressive of wearied lack of contact. The
harlequin costume suggests that it is all a masquerade set up by an
intellectual process: the creative artist poses as a performing
artiste and in so doing takes artistry as his subject. The harlequins,
street entertainers and other artistes of the Rose Period all enact
the process of grasping the role of the artist. They were the product
of complex reflection inspired not least by Picasso's relations with
the literary world in Paris.
In later life, Picasso liked to present himself as essentially
anti-intellectual and purely interested in visual form. But at that
early time in his career he was certainly interested in radical
literary aesthetics, as his first encounter with writer Andre Salmon
indicates. Picasso gave him a book of anarchic poetry by Fagus, the
art critic. The poems were typical, in form and content, of what was
then usual amongst the most progressive of the literati. Picasso's
acquaintance with Max Jacob had introduced him to this taste in 1901,
and a few years later he was regularly at the "Closerie des Lilas", a
Montparnasse cafe where the Parisian literary bohemia liked to meet.
Under poet Paul Fort they met on Tuesdays for discussions, which were
of particular interest to up - and - coming artists.
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Mother and Child
1905
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Picasso's friend Guillaume Apollinaire was a prominent member of
this group. The poet had recently published a play, "Les Mamelles de
Tiresias" (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1903), which was subsequently to be of some significance for the Surrealists.
Apollinaire also wrote endless magazine articles dealing with the new
political and cultural departures in Europe, preaching
anarcho-syndicalism, anti-colonialism and anti-militarism. In 1905 he
also took to writing art criticism, and this was to be of importance
to Picasso. His features appeared in "Vers et prose" and mainly in "La
Plume", a periodical which also held soirees at which everyone who was
anyone in Parisian arts life liked to be seen. Apollinaire's
consistent aesthetic radicalism strengthened Picasso's position. The
poet repeatedly drew the public's attention to the Spaniard's work and
so played an important part in Picasso's early recognition.
One of Apollinaire's interests was directly related to Picasso's
work. He liked to collect and edit erotica and pornographic
literature, and established his own library of pornographic books, now
in the Bibliotheque Nationale and still considered an authoritative
collection. This breaching of a social taboo was partly inspired by
contempt for bourgeois morality; Apollinaire created his own programme of immorality, even starting a short-lived magazine
titled "La Revue Immoraliste".
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Mother and Child and Four Studies of her Right Hand
1904
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Apollinaire and Picasso shared this taste to an extent. 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.
Salmon was also important to Picasso through his critical and
theoretical work on new movements in the visual arts, in which he
emphasized the significant role played by Picasso. Salmon too was
radical in political matters, interested in anarchism, and a friend of
many revolutionaries. Artistically he was most attached to Symbolism.
He played an important part in the arts world, and as secretary of "Vers
et prose" he organized Paul Fort's soirees at the "Closerie des Lilas".
Like Salmon, Picasso's first literary acquaintance, Max Jacob, was a regular visitor to the Montmartre studio, and even
took a room there to work in for a spell. His major writings, founding
works of Surrealist poetry, came a few years later, but in those early
days at the "bateau lavoir" he was already set firmly against
senseless norms.
And another acquaintance was one of French literature's most
dazzling personalities, Alfred Jarry. For him, as for many of his
generation, the Dreyfus affair had shown up the weaknesses of French
society and political life at the turn of the century. Public opinion
had moved decidedly to the left. Jarry became a literary radical. In
his own life he attempted to obey his maxims as an artist, and so
became the very incarnation of the creative outsider. The three Ubu
plays that began with the controversial satirical farce "Ubu Roi" in
1896 were his major achievement. Ubu is a personification of the
philistine rampant who attains power and plunges the world into chaos
through his reckless brutality. The safe, structured existential
certainties of the middle classes are turned topsyturvy. The play
later served as a model for the Dadaists and Surrealists and is seen
as a precursor of absurd drama.
In other words, Picasso was moving in left-wing literary and
artistic circles. Anarchist ideas prompted the rejection of traditional social structures and put unbridled individualism in their
place. This individualism was expressed in a stylized role as outsider
and artist. At this point we can return to Picasso's work. The Blue
and Rose Period pictures of beggars, isolated people, harlequins,
artistes and actors were a way of keeping "official" artistic values
at arm's length, both thematically and formally. The paintings of
Bonnat, Forain, Laurens, Beraud, Gervex, Boldini and others of their
ilk presented society scenes and portraits of salon ladies. The choice
of an artistic milieu for the Rose Period works was a deliberate
rejection of conventional subject matter. And that rejection went hand
in hand with Picasso's quest for a new formal idiom. The subjects he
painted came from a world he knew, and added up to a commentary of the
role of the artist at that time; and the clowns and actors and
artistes were widely viewed as symbols of the artistic life.
Traditionally, the fool or clown has a licence to utter unvarnished
truth and so hold up a mirror to the mighty. During the Enlightenment
the fool's fortunes were at their nadir; but, as the age of the middle
class took a firm grip, the harlequin, pierrot or clown acquired a new, higher value. In France in particular he was seen as
the epitome of the rootless proletarian, the People in person. After
the 1848 revolutions, the new symbolic figure of the sad clown became
familiar.
Baudelaire immortalized the figure in a prose poem. Edmond de Goncourt published a circus novel which dealt allegorically with the
artistic life; his Brothers Zemganno are tightrope walkers and
gymnasts, misunderstood by the public and often facing death, and
acting throughout from an inner sense of vocation. Daumier portrayed
entertainers as restless itinerants, at home nowhere. By the end of
the century, the tragic joker had become a cult figure in Ruggero
Leoncavallo's opera "Pagliacci". Street artistes and the circus were a favourite subject of progressive art, from Manet's
1860 "Street Musician" (New York, Metropolitan Museum) to the circus
pictures of Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat.
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Acrobat and Young Harlequin
1905
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In adopting this line, Picasso was not only succumbing to the
powerful influence of the French cultural scene. His interest in the
subject had Spanish roots too. The Symbolist "Modernista" Rusifiol
had written a play titled "L'Allegria que passa" which made a strong
impression on Picasso when he did illustrations for it in "Arte Joven".
His painting of an actor in harlequin costume, done at the close of
1904, draws upon Rusinol's play. Picasso subsequently did
studies and paintings of a melancholy harlequin, a sad jester, not in
the limelight but withdrawn into a life devoted to art, lived on the
periphery of society and at odds with it. Formally speaking, these
works betray the influence of Daumier. He too concentrated on a very
few, striking figures.
Just as in the Blue Period a number of sketches, studies and
paintings culminated in a major work, "La Vie", so too the
harlequin phase produced the huge canvas "The Acrobats".
It was Picasso's definitive statement on the artistic life. And,
tellingly, it was another artist, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke
(who in 1916 spent some months in the home of the then owner of the painting), who found the aptest words to convey an
impression of the work, in the fifth of his "Duino Elegies": "But tell
me, who are they, these wanderers, even more / transient than we
ourselves . . .
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The Acrobats
1905
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Family of Saltimbanques
(study)
1905
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The Acrobats
1905
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X-ray examination has shown that the final picture was the fruit of
long, painstaking labours, of frequent new starts and changes. It was
begun at the start of the Rose Period in 1904. That composition, later
painted over, was like a study now in Baltimore. This shows a number
of artistes' wives and children seen against a sketchily indicated
landscape. With them, only slightly off the centre axis of the
composition, stands a youth in harlequin costume, hands on hips,
watching a girl balancing on a ball. Plainly the idea interested
Picasso; he did an etching at the same time in which it
appears in almost identical form. A copy of the etching served him
when he came to transpose the scene to the canvas: he superimposed a
grid in order to get everything just right.
That first version shows that Picasso wanted to draw all his
approaches to the entertainer motif together into one composition.
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Circus Family (The Tumblers)
1905
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All of the characters, even specific gestures and poses, appear in
other Rose Period pictures, most famously "Acrobat and Young
Equilibrist". But he was dissatisfied with the result, turned
the canvas round, and painted over it. This changed the format into a
vertical, and instead of a whole family there were now only two young
acrobats. This picture too has survived in a gouache study now in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Again the landscape is merely
hinted at. The two youngsters facing us frontally almost fill the
picture. The taller is in harlequin costume, while the other, still a
child, has a dog with him.
Presumably Picasso felt that these figures were not sufficient to
convey the various aspects of travelling entertainers' lives, for they
too were painted over. Before resuming work on canvas he embarked on a
set of preliminary studies. To an extent he fell back on his first
idea. The centre was now occupied by a burly, seated man whom Picasso
dubbed "El Tio Pepe Don Jose". A number of sketches tried out this
compositional approach and the details involved. At length the artist
hit on a strategy that combined all three of the approaches he had
been toying with, as we can see from a gouache now in the Pushkin
Museum in Moscow. Four male acrobats, standing, now provide
the focus - among them Tio Pepe and two variants on the youngsters of
the second version. What remained of the first version was a heavily
adapted child motif, the young girl. In the background is a horse
race.
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Acrobat and Young Equilibrist
1905
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Boy with a Dog
1905
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Two Acrobats with a Dog
1905
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Mother's Toilette
1905
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Picasso continued to sketch versions of the details till in summer
1905 he finally painted over the canvas for the third time. At first
he adopted the figural arrangement of the Moscow study; only with the
fourth painting did Picasso at long last arrive at the version we now
have. He put the man on the left in harlequin costume, replaced the
boy's dog with a flower basket for the girl, and dressed the boy in a
blue and red suit rather than a leotard. At bottom right he added a
young seated woman. She too, rather than being a spontaneous
inspiration, derived from a previously used motif.
In other words, much as "The Acrobats" may make a unified impression,
as if it had been achieved in one go, it in fact constitutes a
synthesis of the motifs Picasso liked to paint during his Rose Period.
There are now six people; the background is not exactly defined.
There are two blocks: the left-hand group, accounting for some
two-thirds of the picture's breadth, consists of five people, while at
right the young woman is sitting on her own. The contrast is
heightened by subtle compositional means. The positioning of three of
the figures at left very close together conveys a sense of weight and unity, and the Mallorcan woman at right scarcely
provides an effective counterbalance.
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Picasso's palette consists basically of the three prime colours,
plus shadings in black and white to enrich the detail. The reds and
blues are graded in different degrees of brightness, but yellow only
appears mixed with blues and browns, in unrestful presences that lack
much formal definition. Thus various degrees of sandy yellow account
for the unreal, spatially undefinable landscape. The other colours are
caught up in similar spatial vagaries; depending on how bright or
aggressive or foregrounded they are, they are coupled with darker,
heavier shades that fade into the background. Only at first glance
does this make an evenly balanced impression. As soon as we look more
closely, things start to perplex us.
Take Tio Pepe, for instance, in whom Picasso's strategy of contrastive
destabilization is most assertively seen. The massive red-clad man is
conspicuous - and conspicuously lacks the lower half of his right leg!
We can follow it only till just above the knee; and the buff
background only makes his lack the more obvious. This cannot be a mere mistake, nor quite without importance. A defect in
a figure of such thematic and formal importance serves to destabilize
the entire compositional logic, and, once alerted, we see that it is
unreal through and through. The picture lacks a single point of view:
the figures are spatially placed in a curiously all-round way, as if
each zone of the picture were subject to its own perspective. Picasso
is in fact once again telling us that artistic viewpoints are
relative.
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The Harlequin's Family
1905
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And he is doing it in a narrative mode that would well suit a
historical picture. His de-clarified world is precisely the one these
melancholy, uncommunicative characters would inhabit. And Picasso's
departure from the laws of Nature is apt since it matches the manner
in which acrobats earn their living by defying the law of gravity. The
harlequin theme offered not only a visual means of approaching the
life of the artist but also a pretext to review formal fundamentals.
Almost all the paintings of this period suggest that this was the
case, perhaps above all the Moscow picture of the equilibrist, a balancing act in a compositional as well as thematic sense.
In that picture, the visual mainspring is not only the usual
fundamentals of top and bottom, left and right, big and small, but
also light and heavy, foreground and background. These conceptual
qualities are the product of technical tricks; they can be manipulated
to the very limits of possibility, and indeed toying with those limits
can be visually most attractive. Picasso has positioned one extremely
large figure at the right, the seated acrobat, and by way of contrast
on the left a petite, delicate young artiste. If the man were to stand
up he would be taller than the picture. His muscularity emphasizes the
impression of power. But it is passive power, resting, and so far to
the right that we might almost expect the picture to list to that
side. The girl seems feather-light and dainty by comparison, higher up
and further into the midfield. It is this placing that establishes a
balance with the man. We should note in passing that Picasso is
playing with his motifs, teasing our sense of the differing mass of
sphere and cube. The tendency to experiment formally grew upon Picasso
throughout the Rose Period.
In summer 1905, at the invitation of writer Tom Schilperoort, he
made a journey. The writer had inherited some money, and asked Picasso
to join him on the homeward trip to Holland. It happened that Picasso
saw little of the Netherlands; they changed trains in Haarlem and
Alkmaar, but otherwise the small town of Schoorl was all he saw.
Still, it was an encounter with an entirely new landscape and way of
life. The few drawings and paintings he did on the trip were markedly
different from the acrobat pictures. They drew on classical sources
and ancient forms. From Picasso's spontaneous decision to accompany
the Dutchman we can probably infer that his interest in the harlequins
and artistes was at an end and that he was looking for new
inspiration.
"Three Dutch Girls" was the most important fruit of his
journey. It readily betrays its model: even if the young women are
wearing Dutch national costume, they are still grouped as the Three
Graces traditionally were. Since the Renaissance, the classical group
motif had been a much-imitated, much-adapted staple of European art.
Picasso was well acquainted with one version by the Flemish baroque
artist Peter Paul Rubens, in the Prado in Madrid. It was a picture
that apparently enjoyed unusual popularity in Spanish artistic circles
in Picasso's day. The creative involvement with the motifs of
antiquity plainly sprang from inner necessity. After his visit to
Holland, Picasso's work was noticeably informed by the wish to create
dense forms of statue-like balance and poise.
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Three Dutch Girls
1905
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Dutch Girl
1905
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It was a wish that he articulated in numerous new studies and
paintings in which the colourful palette of the acrobat pictures was
replaced by a monochrome red. Most of the sketches, as their subjects
suggest, must have been preliminaries for a large composition Picasso
never painted, showing a horses' watering place. "Boy Leading a Horse" was modelled on archaic figures of youths in the Louvre. Not
only this boy but also male nudes in other paintings and even
portraits done at the time make a three-dimensional impression,
abstracted and simplified, like sculptures transferred to canvas. At this time Pablo Picasso began to give
greater attention to other media such as printed graphics or
sculpture.
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Boy Leading a Horse
1906
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He had made an early attempt at sculpture in 1902, and "The Frugal
Repast" in 1904 had shown him a master etcher at a date when
he had only recently been taught the technique by the Spanish painter
Canals. Just as printed graphics had helped the pictures of acrobats
on their way, so too three-dimensional work in wax or clay informed the formal vocabulary of the pictures that
concluded the Rose Period. Picasso was developing in a new direction
again.
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Head of a Woman
Bronze
1906
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The Jester
Bronze
1905
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