"Picasso
arrived in France just a few days before his nineteenth birthday, speaking no
French and having no place to stay...." Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington,
Picasso:
Creator and Destroyer, New York, 1988
Pablo Picasso's traveling companion to Paris
during this first visit to the cosmopolitan capital of La Belle France was Carles
Casagemas, also a painter, and his flat-mate in Barcelona. It was an unlikely friendship between two
very different young men-- one reserved and a son of prosperous diplomats, the
other an extroverted carouser rarely shy in the face of either beauty or
wine...
 |
| Death of Casegamas, 1901 |
 |
| The Greedy Child, 1901 |
He and Casegamas returned home to Spain but
Casegamas found himself drawn back to Paris, enticed by the charms of a model
named Germaine Gargallo. She did not see
him as the centerpiece of her future, sadly, and Casegamas dramatically (and publicly)
chose to end the affair by executing himself with a single bullet to the head
at the Cafe Hippodrome as he dined with Germaine on the evening of 17 February
1901...
 |
| Blue Nude, circa 1902 |
 |
| Naked Woman with Dripping Hair, 1902 |
Art historians and biographers tell us that
Picasso was in Madrid when he learned of his friend's death. Young Pablo (like the old Pablo) moved
through life like a bull in a china shop or a force of nature-- depending on
your preferred cliche. He'd faced the
cruelty of the Grim Reaper before, in 1895, when diptheria claimed the life of
Conchita, his seven year old sister. The
trauma deeply affected his family-- after the loss of his young child,
Picasso's father no longer wished to live in the town of A Coruna where he
taught at the School of Fine Arts.
Taking a similar position in Barcelona, he took his family with him...
 |
| The Old Guitarist, 1903 |
For the next few years, Picasso traveled back
and forth between Barcelona and Paris, grappling with Casegamas' suicide and
deep personal poverty in cities that delighted the senses of even jaded rich
men, sinking ever deeper into depression as arbiters of artistic taste failed
to recognize his talent and he was forced to burn his own canvases in the
fireplaces of shabby apartments if he hoped to survive the brutal winter cold...
 |
| The Blind Man's Meal, 1903 |
 |
| The Tragedy, 1903 |
Yet his intellect remained restless. Through his friend Max Jacob, Picasso met
many of the men and women who transformed the literary and artistic world of
France during the early years of the 20th Century. He was a master of realistic drawing and
continued to paint in a fashion influenced more by Spanish tradition than
revolutionary French ideas-- but there was a subtle difference emerging in his
work: Picasso's mind now guided his hand toward experiments with form and
color...
These were his Blue years...
 |
| Les Noces de Pierette, 1905 |
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CREDITS
Note:
Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources
such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs. When other sources are employed they are
credited either in the text or as follows:
none. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source
or authorship credits available, except as noted: none.
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