The blue general reads and writes Leonty Vasilyevich Dubelt was a great hunter before reading. However, the general should not be accused of indiscriminate tastes, he did not deserve such reproaches. Even in his relatively young years, he told Kraevsky, the publisher of Otechestvennye zapiski,

At the beginning of the 20th century, Picasso with his friend K. Casahemas left Spain and came to Paris. Here Pablo closely gets acquainted with the works of the French impressionists, in particular, A. Toulouse-Lautrec and E. Degas, who in due time will have a serious impact on the development of the artist's creative thought.

Unfortunately, in love with a French woman and rejected by her, Kasachemas commits suicide in February 1901. The facets of real life and art for Picasso have always been inseparable, and this tragic event, which deeply shocked the artist, was reflected in his subsequent works.

Since 1901, multi-colored paints have disappeared from Picasso's canvases, giving way to shades of a blue-green palette. A "blue" period begins in the artist's work.

A deep, cold and gloomy range of emerald, blue, blue, green colors and shades perfectly conveys the main themes of Picasso's work of this period - human suffering, death, old age, poverty and despondency. The paintings are filled with images of the blind, prostitutes, beggars and alcoholics, they are saturated with a feeling of longing and despair. During this period, the artist, without stopping to lead a bohemian lifestyle, works, creating up to three paintings a day. The Blue Room (1901), The Breakfast of the Blind (1903), The Beggar Old Man with the Boy (1903), The Tragedy (1903), The Two (1904) and, of course, the famous Absinthe Drinker (1901) ) - all these are vivid examples of paintings of the "blue" period.

In 1904, Picasso settled in Bateau Lavoir, a famous hostel in Montmartre, where many artists found their refuge. At this time, he meets his muse - the model Fernando Olivier, who became the inspiration for many of his famous works. And acquaintance with the poets M. Jacob and G. Apollinaire gives a new theme, which has found embodiment in his paintings - the circus and the life of circus artists. So, gradually new colors begin to penetrate into the life and work of the artist. The “blue” period is replaced by the “pink” period of the artist's artistic quest.

At this time, the artist turns to more cheerful tones - pink, smoky pink, golden pink, ocher. The heroes of the paintings are clowns, acrobats, gymnasts, harlequins: "The Acrobat and the Young Harlequin" (1905), "A Family of Acrobats with a Monkey" (1905), "Jester" (1905). The theme of the romantic life of itinerant artists is revealed in one of his most iconic and recognizable paintings - "Girl on a Ball" (1905).

Later, at the end of the "pink" period, the artist painted pictures in the spirit of the ancient heritage - "Girl with a goat" (1906), "Boy leading a horse" (1906).

The “blue” and subsequent “pink” periods of Pablo Picasso's creative life became an expression of his quest to convey mood and his vision of the world using color.

There are opposite judgments about the role of the blue and pink periods in the creative biography of Picasso. Some believe that these periods remained unsurpassed: then Picasso was a true humanist artist, and then, succumbing to the temptations of modernism and possessed by the demon of destruction, he never reached the heights of his youth. This assessment was expressed more or less categorically in our press, and partly in foreign ones. But in most books and articles by foreign authors, a different idea is carried out: in the blue and pink periods, Picasso was not yet himself, remained in the mainstream of traditionalism, and therefore they do not have much value, compared with subsequent ones.

Both of these extreme views are unfair. They are equally derived not so much from the artist's creations as from preconceived judgments about realism and modernism, about traditionalism and innovation. In both cases, the main criterion of value is believed to be the artist's attitude to the Renaissance concept of figurativeness - overcoming it or, on the contrary, preserving it. Meanwhile, for Picasso himself, this moment was, apparently, not decisive - judging by how often he switched from "traditional" to "destructive" forms and back, or used them simultaneously, refusing once and for all to prefer one to the other. The first break with tradition was sharp and dramatic, but later on, the antagonism of the two ways of depicting turned out to be, as it were, removed. Many transitional links were found between them. Both the most “accurate” and the most “conventional” images of Picasso refer to his general creative concept as special cases, and in this sense are equal.

The blue and pink periods are not absolute peaks for the creator of Guernica. Nevertheless, even if Picasso's creative history ended in 1906, if he remained only the author of "blue" and "pink" canvases, he would then go down in history as a great artist.

Twenty-year-old Picasso was already a completely original master. The process of student perception and the elimination of academism, the sentimental genre (and then impressionism and post-impressionism) began with him, as we have seen, unusually early and proceeded in a dense manner. By the beginning of the blue period, all this was left behind. If the delicately fluffy, golden-greenish "Lady with the Dog" (1900) reproduces (and at the same time secretly parodies) the coloristic and textured gourmand of late Impressionism; if a sinister cocotte in a red hat (1900) reminds of Toulouse-Lautrec, a woman washing in a blue room (1901) - about Degas, then in such works of 1901 as "Girl with a Dove", as masterpieces of the Shchukin collection - "The Hug", "The Harlequin and His Wife", "Portrait of Sabartes", Picasso looks like only himself. (One cannot help but marvel at the taste and insight of the Moscow collector Shchukin, who selected from the many works of the young artist exactly those where the real Picasso was.)

At first glance, the pre-Cubist works of Picasso bear little resemblance to the later ones. But they are the sources of his innermost themes and motives, the overture of his work.

K. Jung, approaching the art of Picasso as a psychoanalyst, saw in the blue period a complex of descent into hell. And in fact: at the entrance to this twilight, deserted blue world of metaphysical poverty and silent suffering, the words are inscribed: "I am taking them to the outcast villages."

Picasso then lived in an environment of a half-impoverished bohemia, starving and living in poverty, sometimes he had to heat the stove with heaps of his drawings - however, personal adversity least of all determined the tone of his art. Poet Max Jacob recalled that time: "We lived badly, but beautifully." Picasso was always surrounded by friends, he was full of energy and love of life, but as an artist he was looking for cruel, wounding impressions. He was attracted by the "bottom". He visited insane asylums, hospitals for prostitutes, watched and painted the sick for a long time, in order to nourish and temper the soul with the spectacle of suffering. In his drawings of those years, there are outbursts of dark humor. Once he painted on the wall of the studio of one of his friends a terrible symbolic scene - a Negro hanged from a tree, a naked couple under a tree, making love.

The blue period covers the years 1901-1904. Then Picasso had not yet finally settled in France, often moved from Barcelona to Paris and again to Barcelona. Painting of the blue period is rooted in the tradition of Spain. After passing experiments "in the French spirit", numerous, but short-lived, the matured talent of Picasso again revealed his Spanish nature - in everything: in the theme of proud poverty and sublime squalor, in a combination of cruel "naturalism" with ecstatic spirituality, in humor like Goya, in addiction to the symbolism of life and death. The largest and most complex of the early paintings - "The Entombment of Casagemas" (written under the impression of the suicide of a friend of Picasso) - built like "The Burial of Count Orgaz" by El Greco: below - mourning the dead, above - a scene in heaven, where the atmosphere of a mystical vision intertwined with frivolous images from the world of cabaret. In style, this is close to what the artist did even before his first visit to Paris: for example, in the large watercolor "The Way" (1898), depicting a symbolic procession with funeral groves and a line of hunched over old women and women with children - they wander up the mountain, there they are a huge owl is waiting, spreading its wings. (Half a century later we will meet these funerary groves in the panel "War", and the owl is an invariable attribute of Picasso's art.)

The "Two Sisters" are symbolic - two tired, exhausted women wrapped in veils, a prostitute and a nun, meeting, as they meet in old paintings, Elizabeth and Mary. "Life" is symbolic - a strange, deliberately constructed composition: love, motherhood, loneliness, thirst for salvation from loneliness.

Gradually, Picasso's symbolism is freed from the too obvious taste of allegory. The compositions become outwardly simple: against a neutral shimmering blue background, one or more often two figures, painfully fragile, pressed against each other; they are calm, submissive, thoughtful, withdrawn. The "pre-Cubist" Picasso has no still lifes: he only paints people.

In the French painting of the beginning of the century, the blue paintings of Picasso look apart, for Spain they are organic. French friends of the young Picasso felt in him the presence of an alien beginning, he was not fully understood by them. Maurice Raynal subsequently wrote: "Something mysterious enveloped his personality, at least for us who are not used to the Spanish mentality: the contrast between the painful and heavy power of his art and his own cheerful nature, between his dramatic genius and his cheerful disposition, was striking."

Picasso, like Van Gogh earlier, although in a completely different way than Van Gogh, came with a thirst to express his innermost understanding of the world. That is why he (like Van Gogh) could not succumb to the charm of impressionism: contemplation, the lulling bliss of "appearances" was not for him; in the name of active inner comprehension, he had to break through the shell of the visible.

The activity of the approach has long been associated with the primacy of drawing, and the young Picasso began by returning the drawing to its dominant importance, doing it more decisively and stronger than Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Monochrome blue paintings set off the power of the line. The bluish figures do not drown in the blue of the background, but stand out clearly, although they themselves are almost the same color as the background, and are highlighted mainly by the outline. Inside the contour, the black-and-white and color modeling are minimal, there is no illusory depth created by the perspective in the background, but the contour itself creates the impression of volume - volume on a plane. (This is clearly seen, for example, in a greenish-blue sketch of a nude woman from the back: there is almost no modeling - all the rich plastic of this back, the direction of the volumes, the fullness of the form are conveyed by the contour line.)

Picasso was already an incomparable draftsman then. Sabartes recalled that, watching Picasso at work, he was amazed at the confidence of the movements of his hand: it seemed that the hand was only outlining the invisible outlines already on the canvas.

"Blue Style" - a challenge to Impressionist painting, refusal to submit to the dictates of visual perception, a resolutely taken attitude towards a structural, built, created image. And subsequently, Picasso never, in all his transformations, changed this initial principle.

Researchers note the special importance of the topic of blindness in the works of the early period. The composition "Breakfast of the Blind" in several versions, the painting "The Blind Guitarist", a blind old man with a boy, drawings depicting a blind man with a guide, a sculpture - the head of a blind woman. And the sighted hold on almost like the blind. Their eyes are either half-closed or wide open, but motionless, people do not look at each other, communicating with touches, groping movements of their hands. Hands in the paintings of early Picasso - with long fingers, thin, overly sensitive "Gothic" hands - these are the hands of the blind, hands-eyes.

Why is this addiction to the blind? Is it only from the desire to express the extreme deprivation of people or symbolically show their wandering in a groping world? Apparently, there is something else here: the idea of \u200b\u200bthe clairvoyance of blindness, which is at the same time the clairvoyance of love. Penrose connects the theme of blindness with the artist's constant dissatisfaction with the external, visually perceived aspect of phenomena. “The external aspect has always seemed to him insufficient. Somewhere in the point of convergence of sensory perception with the deep spheres of the mind there is, as it were, an inner eye that sees and understands by the power of feeling. He can perceive, understand and love even when perception with physical sight is impossible. This perception is even more intense when the window to the outside world is tightly closed. " One of the enigmatic sayings of Picasso of a later time becomes clear: “Everything depends on love. This is always the case. Artists should have their eyes gouged out like they gouge out goldfinches so that they can sing better. "

Problems that are considered to be "purely plastic" - design and color, space, shape, deformation - faced Picasso as human problems: communication, understanding, penetration. What brings people together, what saves them from the torment of loneliness? Is it that they are considering each other? No, they feel each other with some other, sixth sense. And should not the artist in his comprehension of things also go with the help of the sixth sense beyond what he simply sees? Picasso always honored an owl - a bird that is blind during the day, but vigilant in the dark.

In his "descent into hell", Picasso tasted all the sadness of human poverty, but did not feel hopelessness - this is more a purgatory than hell. Hope has not been taken from his cripples and vagabonds, because the gift of love has not been taken away. Picasso has no paintings from which there would be such icy loneliness as from the green-red “Cafe” by Van Gogh. He constantly shows how two creatures strive to be together, inseparably and silently - this is perhaps the main internal theme of the blue period.

It is most directly expressed in numerous variants of the "Embrace". Perhaps the most eloquent - a quick sketch in coal in 1901: there is no man and woman separately, no embracing - there is a hug, no two people - there is love of two people. This early drawing is somewhat reminiscent of the much later compositions of Picasso, where he metaphorically depicted lovers through two merging profiles that fit into one another.

Picasso interpreted the motive for embracing with absolute chastity: eroticism is absent here, rather spiritual eros reigns in the Platonic sense. Actually, the erotic in the work of Picasso always sounds menacing, gloomy, is associated with the theme of violence and cruelty - this, perhaps, is also a Spanish trait, so unlike the cheerful sensuality cultivated by French art.

In Picasso's art, sensual passion is one of the varieties of enmity, “war,” the sphere of action of destructive forces. When he wants to talk about love that brings people closer together, he expels the element of sensuality. Sometimes he even makes his characters seem asexual (critics wrote about "androgynous traits"). Dystrophic thinness, exhaustion, drooping fatigue of a man and a woman sitting, hugging and falling asleep, at an empty table, excludes erotic associations: a different, spiritual nature has the desire of two abandoned people to be saved by each other.

These "two", protected by love, are only in some cases a man and a woman, a husband and a wife, and more often - other couples: an old man and a boy, a mother and a child, two sisters, or even a man and an animal: a boy with a dog, a woman with raven, little girl with a dove.

All these characters are outlined in compactly closed contours - their poses themselves are such as if they involuntarily strive to take up as little space as possible in order to be invisible or warm up: squeeze their hands, pick up their legs, pull their heads into their shoulders. When there are two of them, sometimes both figures are included in this closed, closed configuration and “turn into one” almost literally.

It seems that such subjects are especially dear to Picasso, where the weak protects the weakest. He re-spiritualized the ancient theme of the mother protecting the child, and it must be admitted that the best of his "Mothers" belong to the early period. The young Picasso probed the feeling of languid tenderness for a small helpless creature to the very depths and discovered in him something bordering on pain. At first glance, in the manneristic grace of his "Mothers" there is, as it were, a certain chill, but it is a chill, the point of a needle touching a naked heart.

One of the earliest works of the blue period is "Girl with a Dove": a little girl carefully holds a dove between her palms. One can see here the first birth of one of Picasso's cross-cutting themes, passing - explicitly or hidden, deviously, symbolically or directly - through his long work. It is related to the legend of Saint Christopher, who carried the infant Christ through a stormy stream.

To protect the coming day, to carry life, weak and trembling like a candle flame, through the shocks of the century is a theme of hope; many years later she turned into the theme of the world in Picasso. More than forty years after The Girl with the Dove, he made the statue of The Man with the Lamb: the frightened lamb trembles and breaks, the man carries it calmly and as carefully as a girl holds a dove. Many of Picasso's motives, constantly pursuing him, are located around this hidden center: playing children, whom someone strong protects from the monster (such compositions are among the preparatory drawings for the "Temple of Peace"); awake near the sleeper; suffering injured animals; finally, the motif of a candle or torch - a lamp illuminating the darkness: the genius of light, bursting into the hell of "Guernica", holds a candle in his outstretched hand. Sometimes weakness turns out to be strength, and brutal strength turns out to be helpless: in the series with the minotaur, we see a child confidently leading a blind, weakened half-beast.