Picasso's Blue Period
The young Picasso, broke and grieving in Paris, painted the poor, the blind, and the hungry in shades of blue. It was the work that made him an artist.
Picasso's Blue Period: Hunger, Grief, and Blue Paint
Between 1901 and 1904, Pablo Picasso painted almost exclusively in shades of blue. He was between nineteen and twenty-two years old. He was living in Paris, in a damp, unheated apartment at 13 Rue Ravignan in Montmartre, a building known as the Bateau-Lavoir. He was poor. He was sometimes hungry. And his closest friend, Carlos Casagemas, had shot himself in the head on February 17, 1901, in a cafe on Boulevard de Clichy after being rejected by a woman named Germaine Gargallo. Casagemas was twenty-one. Picasso was nineteen. They had met in Barcelona, shared a studio in Paris, and traveled together. Casagemas's death devastated Picasso. He later said, "It was thinking about Casagemas that got me painting blue." The Blue Period is, at its root, a grief response.
The Paintings
The Blue Period paintings show the poor, the blind, the old, and the marginalized. Picasso painted beggars, prostitutes, prisoners, and street musicians. He painted a blind man eating a meal. He painted a mother and child sitting on the street. He painted two figures sharing a frugal meal at a bare table. "The Frugal Repast," available as a print in our store, is an etching from 1904. It shows a gaunt woman and a blind man sitting at a table with a few pieces of bread and a bottle. The woman's fingers are elongated and bony. The man stares into space. The etching is printed in dark ink on paper, but the image is conceived in blue. The figures are emaciated, their bodies reduced to bones and skin. The plate is almost empty. This is what hunger looks like, drawn by someone who has experienced it. The etching was published in a small edition by the dealer Ambroise Vollard. It was Picasso's first published print. He made it when he was twenty-three, living in the Bateau-Lavoir, and selling almost nothing. The etching is now considered one of the most important prints of the twentieth century.
The Color
The blue is not naturalistic. It is not the blue of sky or water. It is a cold, monochromatic blue that covers everything: skin, clothing, walls, backgrounds. Picasso used blue the way a filmmaker uses a filter, to impose a single emotional tone on every image. The color creates a world where everything is cold, everything is sad, and everything is seen through the filter of grief. Picasso was not the first painter to use a monochromatic palette. Whistler had used grey and black in his "Nocturnes." But Picasso's use of blue was more aggressive. He did not use blue as an atmosphere. He used it as the entire painting. Skin is blue. Hair is blue. Bread is blue. The only variations are in the shade: lighter blue for highlights, darker blue for shadows, and occasional touches of green or brown that only make the blue more dominant.
The Subjects
Picasso's choice of subjects during the Blue Period was deliberate. He was not painting the poor out of social concern, though he was certainly aware of their suffering. He was painting them because they matched his emotional state. The blind, the hungry, and the destitute were figures who embodied the isolation and despair he felt after Casagemas's death. He painted blind people repeatedly. The blind man eating a meal, the blind guitarist, the blind beggar. Blindness in Blue Period paintings is not just a physical condition. It is a metaphor for inner vision, for seeing something that the sighted cannot see. Picasso's blind figures often have their eyes closed or their heads tilted upward, as if listening to something invisible. He painted mothers and children. A mother holding a child on the street. A woman nursing a baby. These paintings are tender but never sentimental. The mothers are thin and tired. The children are small and vulnerable. The paintings say: this is what love looks like when it has nothing.
Why the Blue Period Matters
The Blue Period was Picasso's first great body of work. Before it, he was a talented young painter producing competent work in a variety of styles. After it, he was an artist with a distinctive voice. The Blue Period taught Picasso that painting could be an act of emotional truth, not just technical skill. He carried that lesson through the Rose Period, Cubism, and everything that followed. The Blue Period also established Picasso's lifelong habit of transforming personal experience into art. He did not paint Casagemas directly. He painted his own grief, using the poor and the blind as vehicles for an emotion that was too personal to depict literally. This process, of filtering autobiography through invented subjects, became the basis of his entire career. The Blue Period is also the most accessible part of Picasso's work for many viewers. The paintings are representational. The emotion is direct. You do not need to know anything about Cubism or abstraction to understand a painting of a hungry person eating bread. The paintings speak a language that anyone who has ever been sad, hungry, or lonely can understand.
The End of the Blue Period
The Blue Period ended in 1904, when Picasso moved out of the deepest phase of his grief and began using warmer colors. The Rose Period followed, with its pinks and ochres, its circus performers and harlequins. By 1907, Picasso was painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," the painting that launched Cubism and changed the course of twentieth-century art. But the Blue Period was the foundation. Everything Picasso built afterward, the Cubism, the Surrealism, the political paintings, the late work, all of it rests on the emotional honesty he learned during those three years of blue paintings in the Bateau-Lavoir.
Where to See Blue Period Paintings
The Musee Picasso in Paris has the largest collection of Blue Period work, including "La Celestina" and "The Two Brothers." The Museu Picasso in Barcelona holds a significant collection from this period, including drawings and sketches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has "The Blind Man's Meal." The Art Institute of Chicago has "The Old Guitarist," the most famous Blue Period painting. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. holds several Blue Period works on paper. "The Frugal Repast" is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Musee Picasso, and the British Museum.
2 artworks
