Representations of Blindness in Picasso's Blue Period


Representations of Blindness in Picasso’s Blue Period
James G. Ravin, MD; Jonathan Perkins, PhD

T
he Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most important artist of the 20th
century. It is impossible to consider the development of modern art without him. A
unique, highly productive artist who created more than 20 000 works in more than 75
years of activity, Picasso was the most frequently exhibited and critiqued artist of the

last century. Best known as a painter, he also worked in sculpture, prints, ceramics, and theater
design. Blindness was a theme that played an important role in the artist’s first distinctive style,
known as the Blue Period.

Picasso’s earliest work was done in a natu-
ralistic manner and gives few hints of the
future direction his art would take. While
still a teenager, Picasso made several vis-
its to Paris, the capital of the artistic world,
where he exhibited paintings and draw-
ings at the gallery of Ambrose Vollard, who
represented postimpressionists and
younger members of the French avant-
garde. The exhibition was a modest finan-
cial success and brought him further com-
missions. One art critic saw in this show
the debut of a “brilliant newcomer,” but
wrote that “Picasso’s passionate surge for-
wards has not yet left him the leisure to
forge a personal style.”1 During his early
years Picasso developed a strong person-
ality and envisioned himself a sort of artist-
hero, akin to a Nietzschean superman. He
had encountered philosophy and art theory
a few years earlier but remained a studio
artist and never considered abstract think-
ing important to the way he worked. He
found this type of discussion irrelevant and
distracting, and even used the word “blind-
ing”2 to describe such activity.

In late 1901 his work took a dra-
matic turn when he developed his first dis-
tinctive style, the nearly monochromatic
works of the Blue Period (1901-1904).
These works are instantly recognizable by
their overwhelming use of blue colors and
melancholy figures. Several oil paintings

and a print from this period have blind-
ness as a theme. The sad, brooding mood
of these works may have been a reaction
to the suicide of his close friend and fel-
low artist, Carlos Casagemas (1880-
1901), which followed a failed romance.

Images of blindness may be traced
back to Greek antiquity, where the blind
poet Homer is a familiar figure. In Span-
ish art and literature, the blind poet evolved
into the blind guitarist. Blind beggars were
a common sight on the streets of Spain for
centuries. Francisco Goya (1746-1828)
created several paintings and prints of this
subject. Picasso painted and engraved
works based on the theme of blindness sev-
eral times during his Blue Period. Occa-
sionally he returned to images of the blind
later in his career, such as his depictions
from the 1930s of a blind minotaur, an an-
cient Greek mythological figure who had
the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Pervasive use of blue pigment was not
invented by Picasso, for there is a long his-
tory of working this way. His immediate
predecessors in this manner were symbol-
ist painters of Spain and France, who used
blue to emphasize the emotional sensa-
tions of sadness and despair. Many works
in the Art Nouveau style created toward
the end of the 19th century also have an
overwhelming blue tone, with one good
example being Emile Galle’s work in glass
entitled Blue Melancholia.3(p216) Through-
out his career Picasso incorporated the
methods of other artists into his work. Oth-

From the Section of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo (Dr Ravin); and
the Visual Arts Program, University of Illinois at Springfield (Dr Perkins).

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ers have put it more sharply—he stole
from everyone, from the old masters
to his contemporaries. According to
Francoise Gilot, one of his many mis-
tresses, Picasso said, “When there’s
anything to steal, I steal.”4 The blue
works show a particular debt to El
Greco which is evident in the elon-
gated hands and faces. He found
working in blue highly compatible
with his subject matter—the poor,
disabled, and downtrodden.

Some have suggested the pov-
erty-stricken subjects reflect his life-
style at the time. Picasso was cer-
tainly not as rich then as he was to
become later, but he was not greatly
different financially from the rest of
his artistic and literary circle. He had
financial support from home and had
exhibited successfully by this time.
Some have suggested he used blue
primarily because he could only af-
ford cobalt blue paint. This is incor-
rect. He could certainly afford to pur-
chase whatever paints he wanted. He
was still in his youth, testing a tech-
nique that proved to be effective for
him and that had been explored pre-
viously by others.5 Perhaps Picasso
identified with the unfortunate in-
dividuals he painted. His ambiva-
lent comments about Paris are evi-
dent in a letter he wrote that same
year to his friend, the poet and art-
ist, Max Jacob:

My dear old Max, I think about the room
on the boulevard Voltaire and the om-
elets, the beans, and the brie and the fried
potatoes. But I also think about those
days of misery and that’s very sad. And
I remember the Spaniards from the rue
de Seine with disgust.6

If Picasso ever told anyone pre-
cisely why blindness was impor-
tant to him, we have not been able
to find a description. We do know
that his father’s vision was deterio-
rating from an unknown cause at
this time. Inevitably, psychoana-
lytic approaches have been at-
tempted. The psychiatrist Carl Jung
saw “incipient psychic dissocia-
tion” and even schizophrenia in Pi-
casso’s paintings.7 Blindness is a most
serious problem for a painter. In a
recent, highly acclaimed biography
of Picasso, Richardson noted that Pi-
casso was at home in Barcelona with
his parents when he painted some
of the blind figures from his Blue Pe-

riod, and that by depicting “the pros-
pect of what he most feared in life,
was not this a way of protecting him-
self against it?”3(p279) The closest Pi-
casso came to discussing blindness
is this cryptic quotation from the mid
1930s: “There is in fact only love that
matters. Whatever it may be. And
they should put out the eyes of paint-
ers as they do to goldfinches to make
them sing better.”8 Roland Pen-
rose, who recorded these words, also
wrote “The allegory of the blind man
pursued Picasso throughout life as
though reproaching him for his
unique gift of vision.”9 These quo-
tations give a hint that Picasso was
confronting and naming his fears but
do not clarify the meaning of his por-
traits of the blind.

Picasso’s depictions of the blind
are too stylized for us to diagnose
precisely the diseases being delin-

eated. Although the name of the
model for La Celestine (Figure 1)
is known, we do not know what
c a u s e d h e r c o r n e a t o b e c o m e
opaque. Her white eye contrasts
markedly with the blue that domi-
nates the rest of this painting. She
is the one-eyed procuress de-
scribed in the drama of the same
name written by Fernando de Ro-
jas (first known edition, 1499) that
is considered second in impor-
tance in Spanish literature only to
Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Picasso
knew Rojas’s story from his adoles-
cent years, if not earlier.3(p288)

The cause of the atrophic orbit
of The Old Guitarist (Figure 2)
also remains obscure. Picasso
engulfed the region of the eye in a
dark blue shadow in his paintings
of the blind, a characteristic that
can be considered an archetypical

Figure l. Pablo Picasso. La Celestine, 1903, Spanish. Oil on canvas, 81.0 � 60.0 cm. Musée Picasso,
Paris, France, 2003 Estate of Pablo Picasso.

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stylistic feature of the Blue Period.
Similarly, we cannot identify a
cause for the poor vision of the fig-
u r e i n T h e B l i n d M a n ’ s M e a l
(Figure 3). Picasso described
what he was creating in this work
succinctly in a letter: “I am painting

a blind man at a table. He holds
some bread in his left hand and
gropes with his right for a jug of
wine.”1 0 This is one of his few
remarks about works made at the
time, but reveals nothing.

Picasso did not depict figures
in great detail, but tended to ideal-
ize them in these Blue Period
works. He took the elongated
arms, hands, torsos, and heads of
El Greco and placed them in an
early 20th century setting. Some
critics have seen a “spiritual inner
vision” in the blind figures Picasso
created in this way.11 The figures
are isolated and do not interact
well. Other observers have felt this
is a reflection of Picasso’s own iso-
lation at that time.12 Despite nearly
a century of critical comment on
these works, the full meaning is
still unclear. The artist himself did
not offer any help in deciphering
them. When asked, he responded
dismissively, terming the Blue and
Rose Period works as pure senti-
ment.4

But we would argue that the
blind characters in the Blue Period
paintings were not created simply to

make the viewer feel sorry for them.
Picasso found an intensity of other
senses in his depiction of the blind.
In The Old Guitarist and The Blind
Man’s Meal different senses appear
to be enhanced as compared with the
lack of sight. The fact that the fig-
ures are blind might, in and of it-
self, indicate that other senses are
more acute, but Picasso empha-
sized other senses by elongating
forms and was influenced by El
Greco. In particular, the long, thin
hands of the figures in both these
works are fundamental to an en-
hancement of the senses because
they are direct actors in creating mu-
sic in the case of The Old Guitarist,
and in touching the food in The Blind
Man’s Meal. Picasso explored the
“power” of blindness in La Celes-
tine. By depicting an eye with an
opaque cornea next to an appar-
ently normal eye, Picasso juxta-
posed vision and blindness. Para-
doxically, it is the blind eye that
draws the gaze of the viewer. The fact
that the opaque cornea blocks vi-
sion is the very element that at-
tracts vision on the part of the
viewer.

The style of the Blue Period
may be thought of as a kind of
meditation on blindness, or at least
impaired vision. In these works the
artist explores the expressive possi-
bilities of a radical reduction of
color. Picasso surrounded the envi-
ronment with a dark blue veil and
used flat, simplified backgrounds
that threaten to disappear alto-
gether. An obscuring of traditional
vision is the fundamental expres-
sive component of these works. In
investigating blindness Picasso
chose a style that deemphasizes
objective sight in favor of a deeper
vision.

The figures are recognizable as
people, which is more than can be
said for some paintings from his
Cubist period. The fractured cubist
portraits, which depict individuals
from a multitude of directions, con-
fuse many museum goers. The pub-
lic is interested in the Blue Period
paintings from his youth because of
what he created later. Early Picasso
is not as pleasurable to view as Im-
pressionism, to cite just one ex-
ample. Some of the reverence for
these works comes from the fact that

Figure 2. Pablo Picasso. The Old Guitarist,
1903/1904, Spanish. Oil on panel. 122.9 � 82.6
cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Ill,
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.

Figure 3. Pablo Picasso, The Blind Man’s Meal, 1903, Spanish. Oil on canvas. 95.3 � 94.6 cm. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Mr and Mrs Ira Haupt Gift, 1950.

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experts say they should be seen, en-
joyed, and respected for what Pi-
casso was to become, the epitome of
modernism. The most important art
may be difficult to understand, even
disturbing, while art that is super-
ficially appealing may be overly sac-
charine, lack any meaning after the
first glance, and remain totally un-
important.

Picasso made evaluating his
work difficult. He treated with scorn
attempts at analysis and said he just
painted what he saw, the things that
moved him:

When I paint, my object is to show what
I have found and not what I am looking
for. . . . What one does is what counts
and not what one had the intention of
doing. . . . There are no concrete or ab-
stract forms but only forms which are
more or less convincing lies.13

He denied any evolution in his style
even if others separated his work into
radically different phases: “When-
ever I had something to say, I have
said it in a manner in which I have
felt it ought to have been said . . . ”
since

different motives inevitably require dif-
ferent methods of expression. This does
not imply either evolution or progress,
but an adaptation of the idea one wants

to express and the means to express that
idea.13

These statements reaffirm the com-
mon observation that an artist is in-
herently biased when it comes to
evaluating and interpreting his own
work. Picasso actually admitted as
much in saying, “The connoisseur
of painting gives only bad advice to
the painter. For that reason I have
given up trying to judge myself.”14

Picasso’s colors and subject mat-
ter brightened by the end of 1904 as
he entered the next major phase of
his art, the Rose Period (1905-1906).
The change to warmer colors and
more pleasant themes is linked to the
happiness he shared with his first
long-term liaison, Fernande Ol-
ivier. The works of the Blue and Rose
Periods have certainly achieved criti-
cal acceptance, but if Picasso had
stopped painting at this point, he
would be remembered as a second-
or third-rank artist who had not
reached full artistic maturity. The
next phases of his career, particu-
larly cubism (1906-1915) brought Pi-
casso fame on the international level
and made him the single most im-
portant figure in 20th century art.

Accepted for publication October 14,
2003.

Corresponding author and re-
prints: James G. Ravin, MD, 3000 Re-
gency Ct, Toledo, OH 43623 (e-mail:
jamesravin@aol.com).

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