Picasso: the Blue Period and the Rose Period compared

Introduction "forbidden" to amateurs!

It is undisputed, Picasso is one of the best-known artists in the world, so much so that I refuse to even introduce him, in order to avoid obvious repetitions, which would turn the noses of the most knowledgeable art experts, who would feel in this way treated in the same way as the most uncultured amateurs! Irony aside, I pursue in my intention to tell you, perhaps, something less known about the painter's account, starting with the fact that he, unlike other artists who focused their experimentation primarily on one style or point of view, which made them extremely famous (think of the obligatory association between Monet and Impressionism), also enjoyed, Cubism aside, experimenting with additional and well-known "practices," as well as different artistic techniques. In fact, it is the subject of my interest to develop an innovative comparison between the artist's Blue and Rose Periods: two phases of the painter's rich figurative investigation, which is also known to include the African period and that of analytic and synthetic cubism. Enough, let's get to the point! Now it is urgent to reveal all the secrets, historical and theoretical, of the Blue Period, which will be followed by a similar study regarding the Rose Period. Secondly, all these notions will be used in order to compare two paintings resulting from the moments in question, who knows, perhaps animated, even by something capable of uniting them...

LATO II (2022)Painting by Michał Ostrogórski.

The Blue Period

Let us start with the earliest Blue Period, remaining somewhat concise, as it will be less obvious to give more space to the subsequent comparison between the works...Therefore, taking Picasso's words, let us reassume the whole figurative context in question by quoting the sentence, "I set out to paint blue thinking that Casagemas was dead." In fact, the blue period (1901-1904), placed physically between the artist's moves to Paris and Barcelona, arose mainly from the realization of an ominous event, namely the suicide of the aforementioned Carlos Casagemas, one of the artist's closest friends. The grief caused by the bereavement, as well as by the economic straits in which the painter poured at the time, found in the color blue the right tone to be expressed, rendered through the analysis of generally poor and suffering subjects, ready to convey the unhappiness and sadness that inhabited the heart of the artist, who, through art, could externalize his feeling, making it universally shareable by those who, like him, felt strongly within themselves what many call the evil of living...

ANOTHER LANGUAGE (2022)Painting by Young Park.

The Rose Period

"The stillness after the storm," in addition to being the title of a famous poem by Italian Giacomo Leopardi, also seems to summarize when he succeeded the color blue with the more positive Rose Period (1904-1906), a figurative aptitude resulting from the Andalusian's new residence, by then settled at the lively artists' district of Montmartre (Paris), a place where he was able to leave behind the difficulties inherent in the pricipally unstable and transient nature of human life, finding pictorial stylistic stylistics now ready to focus on more cheerful subjects, which, often borrowed from the world of the circus, took on their likenesses through a skillful juxtaposition of vibrant shades of red, orange, pink and earth.

MAGENTA SAUNA (2023)Painting by Shulman.

PASSAGE PROTÉGÉ RÉF. 1396 (2023)Painting by Christian Raffin.

Pictorial comparison: motherhood in rose and blue

We have finally come to the most innovative, interesting and less obvious part of my research, in that, despite the clear and aforementioned differences presented between the periods in question, I have found two masterpieces, one in blue and the other in rose, respectively, which, having related subject matter, lead, despite their quite symbolically distinct chromatic peculiarities, to a similar feeling of affection, protection and tenderness, which can be found, even in the most difficult phases of our lives, in the immense and unflappable relationship of love existing between mother and child. What has been said is well evinced in the work of the Rose Period titled Family of Acrobats (1905), where the real protagonists turn out to be precisely the infant and the woman, whose faces come amorously close almost brushing against each other, to impress the tender eyes, both of the male figure and of the almost humanized matchmaker. Such intimacy, that is, the "unabashed" externalization of such sweetness, derives from one of the oldest "crusades" in the history of art, since, it is only from the thirteenth century onward, due to a renewed drive for a simpler and more passionate devotion, that the figure of the Virgin, an example of a mother par excellence, broke free from Byzantine patterns, to begin to gently approach her child. Such a model of Italic derivation could not be ignored even in the more mournful Blue Period, where, as shown in Mother and Child of 1901, the woman even goes so far as to kiss her child. The figure in question, especially because of her robes, has been recognized by many as a kind of "Madonna," part of a series of similar Blue Period subjects in which the artist often wanted to combine the themes of religion and poverty. Finally, further news regarding the Blue Period and the Rose Period can be discovered through the analysis of some works by Artmajeur artists, such as, for example, Katerina Braiko, Adalberto Miguez, and Dmitriy Trubin.

‘S’ (2023)Painting by Katerina Braiko.

Katerina Braiko: 'S'

Three acrobats cotrue a kind of human pyramid, which brings Picasso's pink period immediately to mind, both in terms of the "circus" theme addressed and the tone of the bright color that animates, in addition to the bodies, the entire canvas, as it is capable of enlivening a dark background, gray in the ground and black in the "sky." Especially, given the physiognomic similarity of the girls immortalized by the work, I also hypothesized that they might be members of the same "lineage," bringing to mind the famous image of Picasso's masterpiece titled Family of Acrobats (1905). The oil on canvas in question depicts a group of circus performers in a timeless, vegetation-free setting, topped by a blue sky populated by clear clouds, ready to illuminate the presence of figures inspired by the commedia dell'arte, who were elected by the artist as icons of bourgeois marginalization. Compared to Picasso's Blue Period, the pink alludes to human suffering in a decidedly softer way, leaving the heavy subjects of depressed beggars behind to refer to figures whose misery in life is rather due to social alienation. Despite these clear allusions, the circus performers are not immortalized with sad looks, but express a certain serenity, perhaps conferred by the colors with which their forms were rendered, which, however, are set in an empty context, inexorably indicative of loneliness.

DISJONCTION XV (2023)Painting by Adalberto Miguez.

Adalberto Miguez: Disjunction XV

What Miguez rendered on the canvas support made me imagine a scene from a movie: two lovers, naked and comfortably lying on their bed, are suddenly caught in a calamity, which leads to the collapse of the floor of their home, something that makes the artist immortalize them in the moment when they are suspended in the air and accompanied, probably, by pieces of falling concrete. This imaginative interpretation of mine cannot fail to come to grips with the objectivity of the theme investigated, that of the nude captured in a light blue, which, by affinity, both of pictorial genre and chromaticity, immediately made me think of the sadder, and decidedly less dynamic, oil titled Blue Nude (1902), a work by Picasso in which a seated model has her back to the viewer, assuming a collected and decidedly introspective position. The body is innovatively depicted from above, placed in an unknowable space, which seems to allude to the state of marginalization in which the figure finds herself living, perhaps disengaged and, fundamentally, rejected. Finally, the masterpiece in question makes it obvious how the Spanish master was skillfully able to transform his bad living into sublime creativity, using sadness to his advantage to create one of the most iconic pieces of the Blue Period.

OLD MAN BEGGAR AND BOY. POE PICASSO Painting by Dmitriy Trubin.

Dmitriy Trubin: Old man beggar and boy

This study absolutely could not miss the analysis of an original remake of a Picasso painting, found in the example of the work made by Trubin, where two humanized nails repurpose the figures of the old blind man and the boy, protagonists of the Andalusian master's eponymous masterpiece on a blue background dated 1903. The latter oil on canvas is known to depict the aforementioned marginalized characters, who, seated against a wall, stand out against a background simply rendered by a horizontal line, intended to give concrete form to the corner of a wall that meets a street. The subjects animating such a backdrop are sad and conspicuously poor, but, in addition to their semblance, it is the expansion of the blue hue that gives greater force to their sad, sorrowful, lonely, and melancholy air. Returning to the characters in question, they were probably borrowed from the subjects that the artist was able to observe, during that period, in Barcelona, wandering especially through the miserable streets of the Barceloneta quarter, where, at that time, beggars used to huddle. In fact, opening a small historical parenthesis, the Barcelona of the early twentieth century was a city decidedly animated by strong contrasts, that is, full of textile factories, where, however, the workers and destitute laborers were basically forgotten.