The Old Guitarist shows a blind, ragged street musician folded around his guitar. Pablo Picasso painted it in Barcelona in late 1903 and early 1904, at twenty-two, when he had almost no money. It belongs to his Blue Period, which began with the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas in 1901, and it is a picture of poverty and grief.
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Nearly everything in the painting is blue, and the old man's body is stretched thin, as if hunger had pulled it out of shape. The picture reflects the young painter's own struggle and his sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden.
That is the answer most books give, and it holds. But the panel was not empty when Picasso began. Under the old man lies another picture, a quiet domestic scene that infrared images revealed in 1998.
I think that changes how the blue should be read. Grief was not the first idea on this piece of wood. It came second, on top of something tender.
The mother and child under the old man
The 1998 images brought a young mother up from under the old man, with a child kneeling at her side. Beside them stands an animal, a calf or a sheep.
The scene was no passing idea. William Robinson, a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, identified a sketch Picasso had sent in 1903 to his friend, the poet Max Jacob. It showed the same subject, a mother and child with a cow licking a calf. In that letter Picasso says he is painting this composition, a few months before he began The Old Guitarist.
Why Picasso gave up on it is not recorded. Mothers and children were a theme of the Blue Period, and La Vie, painted the same year and now in Cleveland, keeps a woman with a child at its edge. The images show a painter who changed his mind completely. He covered the mother with a starving blind man, one of the blind figures he kept painting that year.
What You'll Discover
Why the old man cannot see.
Which color breaks the blue.
Whom the old man might really be.