E8 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST. SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2022 EZ EE E9
BY PHILIP KENNICOTT“Picasso: Painting the Blue Period” sprawls
out of the Phillips Collection’s top-floor special
exhibition galleries into the old mansion,
where it takes two more rooms to chart the
progress of the artist’s early years in Paris,
Barcelona and Madrid. It is an ambitious show
organized with the Art Gallery of Ontario,
where it was first seen last October after a
15-month pandemic delay.
The focus is on three paintings, including
the Phillips’s 1901 “The Blue Room,” and Ontar-
io’s 1902 “Crouching Beggarwoman” and 1903
“The Soup.” The last of these is the strongest of
the three and reveals the artist’s astonishingly
rapid development in just a few years. It also
best demonstrates the scholarly effort of cura-
tors Kenneth Brummel and Susan Behrends
Frank to connect lessons learned from com-
plex imaging of the canvasses to insights about
the artist’s methods, materials and motifs.
But the exhibition has generous parameters
and includes works both predating and follow-
ing the Blue Period of 1901-1904. Early Parisian
paintings, including several made for Picasso’s
first big international exhibition in 1901 at the
Galerie Vollard, suggest in their riot of colors
and madcap brushwork the speed with which
the young artist was appropriating the visual
world of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar
Degas. At the time, Picasso (1881-1973) was still
a teenager and seemed to be working almost
recklessly, with more exuberance than focus.
The Blue Period arrived not with a single
work, but with a change in attitude, not just to
Picasso’s color palette, but to women. Nudes
seen straight on, women with painted faces,
overdressed companions to rich, bored men
give way to more isolated, melancholy figures.
In “The Blue Room,” we see Toulouse-Lautrec’s
poster of May Milton, a dancer at the Moulin
Rouge, on the wall near a solitary woman
bathing in a wide blue tub. The frenetic specta-
cle of Paris’s nightlife seems to be fading into a
shadowy world of perpetual blue twilight.
Later Blue Period works, made after the 1901
“The Blue Room,” suggest that sympathy for
poverty replaces desire as Picasso’s primary
focus. Or maybe not. The curators see a moral
evolution in the young artist, a growing aware-
ness of social misery and a greater sense of
empathy. Picasso was often desperately poor
during this period, and in his visits back to his
homeland, Spain, he encountered dire social
conditions, hunger and unrest. He also spent
time in Paris haunting the women’s hospital-
prison of Saint-Lazare, where prostitutes and
victims of venereal disease were detained. He
would credit his time there as a source of visual
inspiration for some of his key Blue Period
works.
In the Blue Period, women are often clothed
or emotionally shrouded, or seen with their
backs turned to the viewer, and generally less
exposed to the traditional male gaze. They
hunch over their work, or sink deep into a
contained, sculptural crouch. As Picasso’s pal-
ette became more relentlessly monochromat-
ic, space itself seemed to squeeze these figures
into more compressed forms, containing them
with a dark penumbra of rich blue, as if the
world could not allow them even a little air or
light.
Is it empathy that drove him? I don’t find
most of the adjectives commonly applied to
these works at all apt. Are they sad? Melan-choly? Are they “blue” in the sense we often use
that word to describe an emotional state? I
sense more of the artist’s solipsism, his own
late-adolescent despair, than any deep connec-
tion with these women as people.
The dark lines of alienation that surround
these figures detach them from the world,
from reality, from any relationship to other
poor people. They wear their rags of blue
rather like the harlequins and circus figures of
the subsequent Rose Period will wear their
rags of motley. They are in costume to play the
role of pure abjection, expressing the painter’s
inner state more than any genuine state of
poverty in the real world. Their isolation and
solitude aren’t just a visual distillation of the
figure to its elements, but are also designed to
reassure us — the art consumer — that these
poor people aren’t dangerous. They aren’t
gathering, comparing notes, connecting in the
streets or doing anything in the aggregate that
might destabilize the world of art collectors.
One must necessarily have a love-hate rela-
tionship to these works, which are undeniably
compelling, so much so that they have rede-
fined how we think about the color blue and
what it means to be alienated and alone. But in
masterworks such as “The Soup,” there is a
profound disconnection between the figures: a
child who makes a winsome gesture with her
right leg, and a maternal form, head bowed
and face expressionless, who offers the steam-
ing bowl as an act of charity.
There seems more taking than giving in this
image, more a vision of youth grasping than a
mature act of kindness and love. The last stage
of human misery is the war of all against all, the
jungle or state of nature, in which everything is
defined by the need for raw survival. An artist
may feel that not just because he is poor, but
also because he pines for fame.
Scientific analysis and imaging of “The
Soup” suggests at least two layers of distinct
images beneath the final one. In one, a second
female figure is visible next to the child, per-
haps a reference to another Blue Period theme
— of a mother and child or children by the sea.
More intriguing are the remains of what may
have been a still life and tabletop, and possibly
a reference to Honore Daumier’s drawing “The
Soup,” from the 1860s. Picasso may have seen
the Daumier in an April 1901 publication,
curator Brummel argues.
Picasso reused painted canvases during this
period, sometimes out of necessity. But he also
seems to have developed ideas so rapidly that
he often painted over first thoughts. Does “The
Soup” suggest a deeper engagement with the
more authentic social conscience of Daumier?
Are these clues to the evolution of his thoughts,
or are they, to use the artist’s own words, more
evidence of paintings as “a sum of destruc-
tions”?
When Picasso used that striking phrase, he
also described art as a kind of zero-sum game:
What is eliminated in one work inevitably
crops up in another. As the exhibition works its
way out of the Blue Period, we see desire and
the sensuous flood back in with the terracotta-
hued nudes of the Rose Period. Whatever was
going on in the Blue Period — genuine empathy
or adolescent angst — is left by the roadside,
cast off like an old beggarwoman crouched in
the dark.Picasso: Painting the Blue Period Through June
12 at the Phillips Collection. phillipscollection.org.art
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON /ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK
Picasso’s “Lady With a Fan” (1905). The show includes works outside the Blue Period.ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO/ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORKPHILLIPS COLLECTION/ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK
P icasso’s “The Blue Room” (1901) is one of the three main paintings in t he Phillips Collection’s exhibition. The artist’s Blue Period arrived not with a single work, but with a change in attitude, not just to his color palette, but to women.JOHN DELANEY AND KATHRYN DOOLEY, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
A n infrared reflectance image s hows the portrait of an
unknown man beneath Picasso’s “The Blue Room.” Picasso
reused painted canvases during the Blue Period, sometimes
out of necessity.ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO/ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK
In masterworks such as “The Soup” (1903), another focus of the show, there is a profound disconnection between the figures.ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO (AGO)
M IDDLE: Picasso’s “ Crouching Beggarwoman” (1902) is another
focus of the show. A BOVE: An x-radiograph of “Crouching
Beggarwoman,” r otated 90 degrees counterclockwise, shows the
landscape of the “Labyrinth of Horta,” Barcelona, beneath. While
reusing canvases out of need, the artist also seems to have
developed ideas so rapidly that he often painted over first thoughts.CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKa deep dive intothe blue periodHIROSHIMA MUSEUM OF ART, JAPAN/ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK
Pablo Picasso’s “Two Women at a Bar” (1902). In the Blue Period, women are often clothed
or emotionally shrouded, or seen with their backs turned to the viewer.