Picasso blue

In the sample of Pablo Picasso which awaits us between June and July this year House of Spain in Panama (Paseo de Las Bóvedas, Casco Antiguo), lithographs related to the so-called “Blue stage” by painters from Malaga. Blue The Mediterranean Sea, which fertilized the pupils of a young man who became a man in Barcelona, ​​and an intense trip to the glittering Paris of the beginning of the last century.

The blue of sadness and melancholy born of a creative crisis and tragedy that for Picasso assumed the suicide of his colleague Carlos Casagemasthe tragedy may have been caused by a capricious muse Casagemas (Germaine Pichot/Laure Gargallo) he preferred the man from Málaga, smiling and smiling, to the more restrained painter who also suffered from impotence. The blueness of the sea and the depths of a tortured young soul. Blue from those skies and beach horizons; blue from the introspection that students Color psychology.

poetic blue, which was sung by ours Rubén Darío in his original work, drinks from Parnassus of French letters and “spleen” of Charles Baudelaire, decisive influence on the poetics of the 1900s (melancholy or anxiety without a specific cause, so dear to romantic poets and their immediate relatives). The blue of the clear Madrid sky where I walk to El Escorial, Picasso went to meet the Cretan master, self-made from Toledo, to see how the souls of the saints tremble.

They are born from this environment pictures of the Blue Period Picassian, which begins with “The Burial of Casagemas” which imitates “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz”, where Picasso will place prostitutes and dancers in paradise, while the soul of his unfortunate friend goes to her in horse. Will Carl Jung say that the blue period was a descent into hell. In all the paintings of the Blue Period, this atmosphere of sadness and discomfort prevails, but that is why the paintings and lithographs are less beautiful.

There is a mystical intensity in canvases and paper. Picasso seems to believe with Baudelaire that “Je sais la douleur est la noblesse unique. O u’ne mordront jamais la terre et les enfers-” (I know that pain is the only nobility, that hell itself cannot invade.)(Blessing. Fleurs du Mal/Flowers of evil).

Blue in sober tones, almost gloomy, which illuminate the themes of prostitution and poverty. And there we think of Picasso who feels close to the poor, which can be seen and brought to life in paintings such as; Woman in Poverty (1902, Hiroshima Art Museum), in “Visit/Two Sisters”” from 1902, now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, or in “The Tragedy”, from 1903 (National Gallery in Washington).

In the collection in Panama today you can see a lithograph with the theme of poor motherhood, in its crudeness very close to the painting La Vida, a masterpiece of his blue period, which shows an old woman with a child on one side. in weapons Perceptive Reine Marie Riquel and a close friend Picasso, Sabartesthey intuit and testify that the man from Malaga believed that he was Art’s son Grief and pain (Victoria Charles and Anatoli Podoksik: 2010).

There is a tone of asceticism in all of this, where all the figures are reduced to essential, abstract appearances, almost ogival contours, simplified linear character and restrained colors.

But the largest part of the collection that visits us in San Felipe, consists of lithographs on the theme “Dancers“, drawings twinned with the paintings that Picasso painted between 1901 and 1904, which tell us about the world of dance and the family of mountain banks that lead us to the next creative period Picasso, the so-called rose period.

They will have some of the most emblematic ones “A family of acrobats with a monkey”, 1905, today in Gothenburg Museum.

But these blonde dancers are above all a confirmation of an inner journey Picasso in two directions: a classic line, of Greek heritage, on one hand; and the essence in treating space as a source from which every image is created.

an internal process which accompanied by a pilgrimage in Spain, towards the Pyrenees (specific village Gosol in the summer of 1906.) and the simplicity of Iberian art forms a thousand years before Christ; the pilgrimage to the Netherlands, which consolidated its Mediterranean essence, especially due to the use of pink as the color of Greek statues, the transition from ephebe and androgynous forms, to the discovery of the Woman, all of which will finally bring out the primitivism that is in the The origins of the new Picasso.

nobody like him the poet Apollinaire would perceive this rebirth, or this A different Picasso. The intuition of the great innovator of French letters will tell about the passing of the artist to whom it is the muse orders work, the artist was orphaned by it; and,. therefore you must strive to create a new one day after day.

Such a metamorphosis which Picasso will have those years of his young maturity (1905-1097).

Let us accompany Picasso’s soul to this metamorphosis by pausing to observe the collection which Iberoamerican University Foundation he gives us his Cultural work in this commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of an immortal artist of the 20th century.