Picasso Painted the World Blue, for Three Years

In the autumn of 1900, Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris. He was nineteen. He had no money, no French, and a single dim studio at the top of a Montmartre staircase. Within fourteen months his closest friend would be dead — and his canvas would turn a single colour, the deep exhausted blue that would stay with him for three years.

The story of Picasso's Blue Period is sometimes told as a phase of melancholy. It is closer to the truth to say it was a phase of attention. Picasso was looking, for the first time in his life, at the people the world had decided not to see. Beggars on the steps of cathedrals. Blind men reaching for bread. Mothers nursing children in tenement rooms. Old guitarists folding into themselves on cold floors.

He painted them in the cheapest pigment any nineteenth-century studio owned. He also painted them in the most ancient symbol of melancholy in European art.

A friend, a café, a trigger

In February 1901, the painter Carles Casagemas — Picasso's closest friend in Paris — entered a café on the Boulevard de Clichy, drew a pistol, fired at a former lover, missed, and turned the gun on himself. He was twenty.

Picasso had been Casagemas's roommate, his fellow émigré, his witness to the city's terms — which were unkind to two Catalan painters arriving without money. The death broke something the way certain deaths only do. Within weeks Picasso had finished a painting of his friend's body laid out in his coffin, the colour of the bedsheet pulled half over Casagemas's face. That painting, The Death of Casagemas, was the last in which Picasso used reds and yellows for almost three years.

After that, blue.

The cheapest blue in any studio

There is a story art historians tell about why Picasso turned to a single colour. It is mostly a story about grief. But the more revealing story is about a paint tube.

Cobalt blue, in 1901, was the cheapest pigment a painter could buy. The colour had been industrialised at the start of the nineteenth century, and by the time Picasso reached Paris, a small tube cost a fraction of what cadmium yellow or vermilion did. A young painter without francs could afford blue when he could afford nothing else.

That much is practical. The other side of the story is older.

In the iconography of Western painting — going back through Dürer and Bellini and the illuminated psalters of the medieval north — blue is the colour of Mary's robe, of mourning, of the hour after dusk, of the sea seen from a cell window. It is the pigment painters reached for when they wanted to say: this is not a happy painting. Picasso, who had studied at Madrid's Prado for two winters before leaving for Paris, knew the entire history of that meaning. He used it.

He painted the forgotten

Look at the figures Picasso chose during these three years. They are almost never named, almost never grand, never the kind of subject the academic painters were submitting to the Paris Salon. They are beggars. Prisoners. Women confined to Saint-Lazare, the women's prison hospital where Picasso visited in 1902 through the introduction of a doctor named Louis Jullien. The blind. The old. The unhoused who slept in stairwells when the cafés closed.

In the academic tradition Picasso had been trained in, these people were not subjects. They were the negative space around the subjects — the figures the academic painter would smudge out or leave on the edge of the frame. Picasso put them in the centre and stayed there. He painted a blind beggar receiving a meal at a bare table. A mother and her sleeping child wrapped in a single blanket. Three strangers standing barefoot on a beach with no horizon, no time of day, no clear century. He called that one The Tragedy.

What the Blue Period gave him — and what he did not have before — was a register grave enough to look at these subjects without sentimentality. The colour did the moral work. It declared, before any line was drawn, that the painter was approaching the figure not as material but as company.

Beneath the strings, a lady

In 1903, in the same Madrid attic where he had returned to wait out a poor winter, Picasso painted The Old Guitarist — an emaciated man slumped over a wide-bellied instrument, his neck and limbs lengthened almost to caricature, his face hidden against the strings. The painting is now the most reproduced image of the Blue Period.

Then in the twentieth century, it passed under an X-ray camera, and another image appeared.

Beneath the layers of cobalt and ultramarine that make the guitarist's body, X-rays revealed a second composition — a portrait of a kneeling woman, possibly with a small child, painted on the same canvas before Picasso painted over her. The earlier figure had been completely buried. The traces of her hair, her shoulders, and the face of a second figure can still be made out faintly under the right kind of light.

This was not unusual. Through the Blue Period, Picasso painted over Picassos again and again. He could not afford fresh canvas. The old paintings became the underpainting of the new — a palimpsest where his earliest months in Paris are still physically present beneath his most famous works, even when no one can see them.

The Blue Room, painted in 1901 in the studio he had briefly shared with Casagemas, hides one such secret. Modern X-ray analysis revealed in 2014 that beneath its surface is the portrait of a bearded man in a bow tie — a face Picasso never explained, never published, never confirmed.

Then a woman called Fernande

By 1904 Picasso was twenty-three, had moved permanently to Paris, had taken a studio in a Montmartre building the painters called the Bateau-Lavoir — the laundry-boat — and was about to fall in love.

Her name was Fernande Olivier, a model who lived in the same building. The story Fernande herself told, decades later, was simple: he was caught in a thunderstorm in the courtyard, she offered him shelter, he stayed for seven years.

His palette began to shift almost immediately. The blue grew warmer. Then the warmth itself began to take on a faint dusty pink — the colour of saltimbanque tights, of cheap powder, of Spanish villages in late afternoon. By the end of 1904 he was painting acrobats. By 1905 he was painting Family of Saltimbanques — five figures in a desert landscape, in costumes from a travelling circus, the Blue Period figures' grief now softened into something closer to fatigue.

The Rose Period had begun. The blue did not vanish — it migrated, into the shadow under a child's ribcage, into the sky at the edge of the frame, into a single garment of a wandering harlequin. But it was no longer the air every figure was breathing.

The archive

Three years of one colour. Then a woman called Fernande, and the blue gave way to rose.

Browse the classical archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.