(3 of 11)
The point is not that Picasso, as an art student in Barcelona and, after the autumn of 1900, a young artist in Paris, was markedly better at imitating Steinlen or Toulouse-Lautrec than other Spanish artists were, but that he could run through the influences so quickly, with such nimble digestion. What he needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some of these are of remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred by laughter or squinched up into pug masks of greed, seem to predict by ten years the jittery misogyny of German expressionism. Woman in Blue, 1901, with her fierce little Aubrey Beardsley whore's head surmounting the dress of a Velázquez court portrait, is an especially compelling example.
For a young artist in Paris at the turn of the century, such material could not last forever, and not all Picasso's experiences were gaslight and garters. Living in poverty in the little Spanish artists' colony in Montparnasse, he identified himself in a sentimental way with the wretched and down-and-out of Paris, the waifs and strays. This wistful misérabilisme, verging on allegory, was the keynote of his so-called Blue Period. Late in 1901 he had painted some Gauguin-like figures, using the characteristic flat silhouettes and solid blue boundary lines that Gauguin, in his turn, had extracted from Japanese decorative art. By 1902 the blueness of this line had spread to dominate the whole painting. It had a symbolic value, of course: it spoke of melancholy, of the "blues." But it also enabled Picasso, as the pervasive brown-gray monochrome of analytical cubism later would in a different way, to take color out of his work, so that he could make a compromise between decorative flatness and sculptural volume in terms of pure tone.
The influence of one artist dominates the Blue Period. He was Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), a painter of pale, chalky allegories, figure compositions with gravely flattened and somewhat elongated bodies, whose work was admired by Van Gogh, Gauguin and the symbolists of the 1890s, as well as young Turks like Picasso. He had studied Puvis's frescoes in the Pantheon, and their upright, formalized mien gave the measure to his big allegory of young love and despair, La Vie, 1903. (Originally the young man in the painting was a self-portrait, but Picasso turned it into the face of Carlos Casagemas, the friend who had come with him to Paris from Barcelona and then committed suicide for love of an artist's model.)