WASHINGTON — An expert on Pablo Picasso once told me that if the painter had been hit by a bus in 1905, he would have come to us as a minor member of the Symbolist movement, pouring out in France at the time. It’s pretty clear that Picasso only really matters to what he came up with a few years later, when his Cubist photographs tore the fabric of Western art.
In “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period,” in the Phillips Collection here through June 12, nearly all of the art predates 1905. But despite—or because of—the photos’ “wrong” dates, this show is poignant. Yes, we don’t get to see Picasso until he figured out how to make art that matters. Sometimes he is clearly on the wrong track. But we also get the chance to see how this very young man gets his first idea of the artist he should become.
Curated by Susan Behrends Frank, of the Phillips, and Kenneth Brummel, of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the exhibition includes more than 40 paintings by Picasso plus drawings, prints and a few sculptures by him and others. They give a nice overview of what the artist did in the early years of the 20th century, when he commuted back and forth between Barcelona and Paris, where he moved for good in 1904. These were the years when Picasso, barely in his 20s, perfected the style of what is called his Blue Period.
The Phillips has brought in well-known Blue Period paintings, such as “The Soup,” a 1903 work from the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the show premiered last fall: A woman in blue robes bends over to a small clad in blue. girl to offer her a blued bowl of hot soup – naturally giving off a cloud of blue steam.
Another famous canvas, painted a year or two earlier and now owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, shows another woman in blue, this time sitting on a stone bench in front of an open window looking out at a blank blue sky. In English, the painting has been given the title “Melancholic Woman”, underscoring the most striking fact about this work and others of its kind: their blueness clearly extends all too clearly to their emotions, which can be so gloomy they go to bathos.
The style of Picasso’s blue paintings corresponds to their subject matter: it is equally easy, too easy and fluid to capture all the ways we humans know how to suffer. Their style normalizes suffering by turning it into pleasurable art. The misery should never end so easily.
But the ease with which we digest these paintings may explain why they have become Picasso’s most popular, and the ones that fetch some of his highest prizes: they allow us to have the frisson of meeting a recognized genius without actually having to. to do. confront the amazing difficulty of the cubist paintings that did the certification.
That difficulty is there, at least in utero, in some of the Phillips’ other early works. They give a thrilling glimpse of Picasso coming into his own.
Even photos with subjects that seem fairly straightforward, such as the paintings now called “Nude With Cats” and “Woman With Blue Stockings,” both taken in 1901 for the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris, can have a wild brushwork that darkens and dismantles more than it imagines, as cannot be said of even the most obscure brushstrokes of Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Picasso is not trying to create a coherent rough style; at best, he exerts a rudeness that just keeps his art from solidifying in style. These paintings are brilliantly hard on the eyes. That stands, brilliantly, for the harsh reality of the prostitutes they depict.
The Phillips Collection’s most notable Picasso, “The Blue Room” from 1901, has not—or has not yet settled for—the stylish convenience of the more classic Blue Period works. Picasso allows the body of the bathing woman in the center of the room to fall into complete incoherence and asymmetry, with arms barely articulated; they fall from shoulders that hardly make sense as human body parts.
This is not a bathing beauty, as Picasso would have seen in paintings by Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. but a woman caught in the all-too-human awkwardness of trying to bathe a body in a shallow tub in a shabby bedroom. Or, more likely, this is a sex worker dealing with what it means to clean a body that has just been sold to a random guy who happens to have a few extra sous in his pocket – perhaps the man who paints this memento of the encounter, to sell to another John who collects photos.
To understand what Picasso is up to here, it is worth comparing his image of the painting’s ‘real’ bather with the fully clothed dancer in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster hanging on the wall of the the bather’s bedroom. That elegant poster represents exactly the kind of completely coherent style that Picasso so clearly avoids in the rest of the painting, struggling to depict the world rather than settling for yet another artful way of doing it.
That makes it a precursor to Picasso’s Cubism, which is never just about discovering a new way in which photographs represent life. (Although that’s how Cubism is often billed, almost from the time it was invented, by almost everyone but Picasso.) Cubism can be better understood as a grand statement of the impossibility of coherent representation in a modern world — or on at the very least a modern world art world — which has exhausted all possibilities for coherence. Art historian TJ Clark has spoken of Cubism’s willingness “to make the best of that darkness and ultimately enjoy it.”
“I cannot go on, I go on,” said a character in a novel by the great modernist Samuel Beckett – “the maestro of failure”, as he was once called – and Beckett’s famous phrase could be Picasso’s motto, the cubist.
That radical Picasso can already be seen at work in “The Blue Room”, and not just in the bather in the middle. Look at the prayer rug on her feet, which she uses to cover a cold attic floor: the pattern in the middle, which in the real rug would have been intended as a mihrab, or prayer niche, pointing to Mecca (I doubt Picasso would have become something of an avatar of the woman above it, but reduced to the tiniest patch of pink flesh around a brown patch of pubic hair and against a background that is not at all cohesive.
Take just this part of the painting — cut it out of the canvas in your mind’s eye — and you’ve got a pretty good idea of where Picasso would be in a handful of years.
Picasso: painting the blue period
Through June 12, The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC; (202) 387-2151; phillipscollection.org.