Who is the man hidden under Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Blue Room’?
The Blue Room is one of the earliest examples of Pablo Picasso‘s “Blue Period”.
As the name suggests, his creative focus was honed in on suffering during this period. Where other artists might use washed-out sepia shades to illustrate their own sorrows, Picasso, an outsider even in his early years, turned to deep greens and blues. His borderline obsession with sadness and suffering was uncharacteristic of his later work but a defining moment for the artist. The painting reflected his chaotic inner life and held in it a secret figure who seemed to reveal why he’d become so cynical.
The blue years were an extremely hard time for Picasso. At only 19, he lost his close friend Carles Casagemas, who’d shot himself in the head at a dinner party. They’d once shared a studio, and the Spanish poet was an inspiration and muse for Picasso, who produced various portraits of him. His sudden death massively impacted Picasso, whose artwork became heavier with grief. He never tried to recreate his initial portraits and instead turned to other trouble figures for much of the blue period.
In the place of his suffering friend, he painted drunks, prostitutes and the poor, all in similar shades of washed-out blue. He had told Pierre Daix that mourning was what shaped that artistic choice, saying: “It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue.” The Blue Room is one of the more emotionally neutral paintings, showing a nude woman washing. It draws from the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was preoccupied with similar groups throughout his career.
Picasso provided viewers with a visual guide to his influences and positioned a small poster of a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec in the woman’s room. The size of the room also reflected Picasso’s own, and the fact it’s a bathroom and bedroom all in one speaks to his financial difficulties at the time. Coupled with grief were immediate worries his burgeoning art career would never work out, and he lived in poverty for much of the Blue Period.
Because there was such little commercial interest in his sombre paintings, he continually painted new ones in the hope they’d sell. When they inevitably didn’t, he was so poor he’d be forced to paint over them and start again. Given he habitually did this, historians since the 1950s have wondered aloud if there might be a second painting underneath. A conservator from the Phillips Collection added to the intrigue when he announced a patch of the painting that seemed a different texture than the rest.
In 1997, X-rays of the painting found a second layer underneath. As technology advanced and curiosity grew, in 2008, infrared scans found its subject. In what’s since been dated to 1901, a portrait of a slumped man was found. The mysterious man was bearded and wearing a bowtie. In Picasso’s previous work, Portrait of Carles Casagemas (1899-1900), his old friend stood tall, dressed in a suit and bowtie.
