Yes, this is an article about Picasso and the colour blue. You may be thinking that as a primary colour, blue’s appearance in his work would be nothing too surprising. Yet, what I’m talking about is Picasso’s Blue Period, where he obsessively used the colour, abandoning almost every other pigment.
Who was Pablo Picasso?
To almost everyone, he is a famous artist, known for his unique style. He did many other things as well, such as co-creating cubism and establishing a significant mark in art history. Yet, he is perhaps best known for the idiom of ‘I’m no Picasso’ when someone flunks an art homework (an unrealistic statement as Picasso’s later works were just as abstract as your homework). When he was young, he wasn’t quite the smartest child and would spend his days doodling in his notebook instead of studying. At age 14, he applied to an art school and got accepted. He, however, repeatedly skipped those lessons to draw in the streets, finding the studies taught in the art school boring. Picasso’s early works were realistic and fit into academic standards. He spent his later life learning to draw as a child, a task mentioned in the remarkable quote by him that recalls how it ‘took me (him) four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child’. However, whether Picasso was a morally righteous man is a fair argument, one which I have strong opinions about (he was not) and will perhaps discuss later.
The Colour Blue
The first blue ever was made by the Ancient Egyptians and to this day, more shades are being discovered. Blue is associated with sadness for a few reasons, one being the almost childish thought that the sky ‘cries’ blue droplets of water, which we know as rain. Nonetheless, many scientists see that the hue displays soothing effects on humans. Yet darker shades are often associated with depression and sadness. This colour is unique because it can display many different elements of emotion: it can represent a dark, deadly storm or calming and stunning baby-blue skies.
What was the Blue Period?
Picasso’s Blue Period occurred from 1900 to 1904. The colours used in his paintings then were all blue, often accompanied by green (a close neighbour to blue), and rarely with warm colours. Pablo Picasso painted the works in Paris in the 1900s, though the works were inspired by Spain and the poverty present there during the time. Picasso’s technique of painting pale, sickly skin between dark hues of blue showed the viewer an image of a social outsider, someone who was a ‘sore-thumb’ in society during the time. This demographic were usually the poor who were stricken by the country’s struggle Additionally, he also included several other themes in his art, such as death.
Why did Pablo Picasso shift to all Blue Paintings during it?
As mentioned before, Pablo Picasso drew scenes of poor and socially disliked people he had witnessed in Spain. But, his work was also influenced by the depression he suffered from. After the tragic death of a close friend named Casagemas and the hardships he faced as an unknown and poor artist, he turned to such hues to show his mental despair through what he knew best: art. He himself stated how he “started painting in blue when I (he) learned of Casagemas’s death” Through his painting, he drew peasants and beggars in the same emotional mindset as him: sad and unpleasant with life. However, his disheveled mental state continued, even after his art palette shifted out of blue.
It is safe to assume that the colour blue in Picasso’s works served not only as a pigment mixed with oils painted on a canvas but also as a medium of pain, suffering and the universal language of human sadness. Through each painting, we are not only met with the pigment in all its glory (perhaps a character in itself) but we are also crowded with the image of people suffering, an all too common scene.
