Representations of Blindness in Picasso's Blue Period

SPECIAL ARTICLE Representations of Blindness in Picasso’s Blue Period James G. Ravin, MD; Jonathan Perkins, PhD he Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most important artist of the 20th century. It is impossible to consider the development of modern art without him. A unique, highly productive artist who created more than 20000 works in more than 75 years of activity, Picasso was the most frequently exhibited and critiqued artist of the Tlast century. Best known as a painter, he also worked in sculpture, prints, ceramics, and theater design. Blindness was a theme that played an important role in the artist’s first distinctive style, known as the Blue Period. Picasso’s earliest work was done in a natu- and a print from this period have blind- ralistic manner and gives few hints of the ness as a theme. The sad, brooding mood future direction his art would take. While of these works may have been a reaction still a teenager, Picasso made several vis- to the suicide of his close friend and fel- its to Paris, the capital of the artistic world, low artist, Carlos Casagemas (1880- where he exhibited paintings and draw- 1901), which followed a failed romance. ings at the gallery of Ambrose Vollard, who Images of blindness may be traced represented postimpressionists and back to Greek antiquity, where the blind younger members of the French avant- poet Homer is a familiar figure. In Span- garde. The exhibition was a modest finan- ish art and literature, the blind poet evolved cial success and brought him further com- into the blind guitarist. Blind beggars were missions. One art critic saw in this show a common sight on the streets of Spain for the debut of a “brilliant newcomer,” but centuries. Francisco Goya (1746-1828) wrote that “Picasso’s passionate surge for- created several paintings and prints of this wards has not yet left him the leisure to subject. Picasso painted and engraved forge a personal style.”1 During his early works based on the theme of blindness sev- years Picasso developed a strong person- eral times during his Blue Period. Occa- ality and envisioned himself a sort of artist- sionally he returned to images of the blind hero, akin to a Nietzschean superman. He later in his career, such as his depictions had encountered philosophy and art theory from the 1930s of a blind minotaur, an an- a few years earlier but remained a studio cient Greek mythological figure who had artist and never considered abstract think- the head of a bull and the body of a man. ing important to the way he worked. He Pervasive use of blue pigment was not found this type of discussion irrelevant and invented by Picasso, for there is a long his- distracting, and even used the word “blind- tory of working this way. His immediate ing”2 to describe such activity. predecessors in this manner were symbol- In late 1901 his work took a dra- ist painters of Spain and France, who used matic turn when he developed his first dis- blue to emphasize the emotional sensa- tinctive style, the nearly monochromatic tions of sadness and despair. Many works works of the Blue Period (1901-1904). in the Art Nouveau style created toward These works are instantly recognizable by the end of the 19th century also have an their overwhelming use of blue colors and overwhelming blue tone, with one good melancholy figures. Several oil paintings example being Emile Galle’s work in glass entitled Blue Melancholia.3(p216) Through- From the Section of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo (Dr Ravin); and out his career Picasso incorporated the the Visual Arts Program, University of Illinois at Springfield (Dr Perkins). methods of other artists into his work. Oth- (REPRINTED) ARCH OPHTHALMOL / VOL 122, APR 2004 WWW.ARCHOPHTHALMOL.COM 636 ©2004 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Downloaded From: https://jamanetwork.com/ on 09/23/2021 ers have put it more sharply—he stole from everyone, from the old masters to his contemporaries. According to Francoise Gilot, one of his many mis- tresses, Picasso said, “When there’s anything to steal, I steal.”4 The blue works show a particular debt to El Greco which is evident in the elongated hands and faces. He found working in blue highly compatible with his subject matter—the poor, disabled, and downtrodden. Some have suggested the pov- erty-stricken subjects reflect his life- style at the time. Picasso was certainly not as rich then as he was to become later, but he was not greatly different financially from the rest of his artistic and literary circle. He had financial support from home and had exhibited successfully by this time. Some have suggested he used blue primarily because he could only afford cobalt blue paint. This is incor- rect. He could certainly afford to pur- chase whatever paints he wanted. He was still in his youth, testing a tech- nique that proved to be effective for him and that had been explored pre- viously by others.5 Perhaps Picasso identified with the unfortunate in- dividuals he painted. His ambiva- lent comments about Paris are evident in a letter he wrote that same year to his friend, the poet and artist, Max Jacob: Figure l. Pablo Picasso. La Celestine, 1903, Spanish. Oil on canvas, 81.0ϫ60.0 cm. Muse´e Picasso, My dear old Max, I think about the room Paris, France, 2003 Estate of Pablo Picasso. on the boulevard Voltaire and the om- elets, the beans, and the brie and the fried potatoes. But I also think about those riod, and that by depicting “the pros- eated. Although the name of the days of misery and that’s very sad. And pect of what he most feared in life, model for La Celestine (Figure 1) I remember the Spaniards from the rue was not this a way of protecting him- is known, we do not know what de Seine with disgust.6 self against it?”3(p279) The closest Pi- caused her cornea to become casso came to discussing blindness opaque. Her white eye contrasts If Picasso ever told anyone pre- is this cryptic quotation from the mid markedly with the blue that domi- cisely why blindness was impor- 1930s: “There is in fact only love that nates the rest of this painting. She tant to him, we have not been able matters. Whatever it may be. And is the one-eyed procuress de- to find a description. We do know they should put out the eyes of paint- scribed in the drama of the same that his father’s vision was deterio- ers as they do to goldfinches to make name written by Fernando de Ro- rating from an unknown cause at them sing better.”8 Roland Pen- jas (first known edition, 1499) that this time. Inevitably, psychoana- rose, who recorded these words, also is considered second in impor- lytic approaches have been at- wrote “The allegory of the blind man tance in Spanish literature only to tempted. The psychiatrist Carl Jung pursued Picasso throughout life as Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Picasso saw “incipient psychic dissocia- though reproaching him for his knew Rojas’s story from his adoles- tion” and even schizophrenia in Pi- unique gift of vision.”9 These quo- cent years, if not earlier.3(p288) casso’s paintings.7 Blindness is a most tations give a hint that Picasso was The cause of the atrophic orbit serious problem for a painter. In a confronting and naming his fears but of The Old Guitarist (Figure 2) recent, highly acclaimed biography do not clarify the meaning of his por- also remains obscure. Picasso of Picasso, Richardson noted that Pi- traits of the blind. engulfed the region of the eye in a casso was at home in Barcelona with Picasso’s depictions of the blind dark blue shadow in his paintings his parents when he painted some are too stylized for us to diagnose of the blind, a characteristic that of the blind figures from his Blue Pe- precisely the diseases being delin- can be considered an archetypical (REPRINTED) ARCH OPHTHALMOL / VOL 122, APR 2004 WWW.ARCHOPHTHALMOL.COM 637 ©2004 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Downloaded From: https://jamanetwork.com/ on 09/23/2021 stylistic feature of the Blue Period. a blind man at a table. He holds make the viewer feel sorry for them. Similarly, we cannot identify a some bread in his left hand and Picasso found an intensity of other cause for the poor vision of the fig- gropes with his right for a jug of senses in his depiction of the blind. ure in The Blind Man’s Meal wine.”10 This is one of his few In The Old Guitarist and The Blind (Figure 3). Picasso described remarks about works made at the Man’s Meal different senses appear what he was creating in this work time, but reveals nothing. to be enhanced as compared with the succinctly in a letter: “I am painting Picasso did not depict figures lack of sight. The fact that the fig- in great detail, but tended to ideal- ures are blind might, in and of it- ize them in these Blue Period self, indicate that other senses are works. He took the elongated more acute, but Picasso empha- arms, hands, torsos, and heads of sized other senses by elongating El Greco and placed them in an forms and was influenced by El early 20th century setting. Some Greco. In particular, the long, thin critics have seen a “spiritual inner hands of the figures in both these vision” in the blind figures Picasso works are fundamental to an en- created in this way.11 The figures hancement of the senses because are isolated and do not interact they are direct actors in creating mu- well.

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