''The Old Guitarist'' is an

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the

Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection The Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection is an art collection held by the Art Institute of Chicago.Art Institute of Chicago It is based on a collection assembled by Helen Louise Birch and her husband, Frederic Clay Bartlett. Birch and Bartlett ...

. At the time of ''The Old Guitarist''s creation,

Modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

Impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...

Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction a ...

, and

Symbolism Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: Arts * Symbolism (arts), a 19th-century movement rejecting Realism ** Symbolist movement in Romania, symbolist literature and visual arts in Romania during the late 19th and early 20th centuries ** Russian sym ...

had greatly influenced Picasso's style. Furthermore, El Greco, Picasso's poor standard of living, and the suicide of a dear friend influenced Picasso's style at the time which came to be known as his Blue Period. Several x-rays, infrared images and examinations by curators revealed three different figures hidden behind the old guitarist.

Background

At the time, having renounced his classical and traditional education and searching for fame, Picasso and his friend Carlos Casagemas moved to Paris. A year later, Casagemas became hopelessly miserable from a failed love affair and committed suicide. Picasso was greatly afflicted by this event and was soon depressed and desolate. In addition, Picasso was very poor. His poverty made him identify and relate to beggars, prostitutes and other downtrodden outcasts in society. These events and circumstances were the impetus for the beginning of Picasso's Blue Period which lasted from 1901 to 1904. The Blue Period is identified by the flat expanses of blues, greys and blacks, melancholy figures lost in contemplation, and a deep and significant tragedy. After the Blue Period came Picasso's Rose Period, and eventually the Cubism movement which Picasso co-founded.

Analysis

Elements in ''The Old Guitarist'' were carefully chosen to generate a reaction from the spectator. For example, the monochromatic color scheme creates flat, two-dimensional forms that dissociate the guitarist from time and place. In addition, the overall muted blue palette creates a general tone of melancholy and accentuates the tragic and sorrowful theme. The sole use of oil on panel causes a darker and more theatrical mood. Oil tends to blend the colors together without diminishing brightness, creating an even more cohesive dramatic composition. Furthermore, the guitarist, although muscular, shows little sign of life and appears to be close to death, implying little comfort in the world and accentuating the misery of his situation. Details are eliminated and scale is manipulated to create elongated and elegant proportions while intensifying the silent contemplation of the guitarist and a sense of spirituality. The large, brown guitar is the only significant shift in color found in the painting; its dull brown, prominent against the blue background, becomes the center and focus. The guitar comes to represent the guitarist's world and only hope for survival. This blind and poor subject depends on his guitar and the small income he can earn from his music for survival. Some art historians believe this painting expresses the solitary life of an artist and the natural struggles that come with the career. Therefore, music, or art, becomes a burden and an alienating force that isolates artists from the world. And yet, despite the isolation, the guitarist (artist) depends on the rest of society for survival. All of these emotions reflect Picasso's predicament at the time and his criticism of the state of society. ''The Old Guitarist'' becomes an allegory of human existence.

Paul Mariani Paul Mariani (born 1940 in New York City) is an American poet and is University Professor Emeritus at Boston College. Life Paul Mariani is the University Professor Emeritus at Boston College, specializing in Modern American and British Poetry, r ...

, a biographer of

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

, presented his analysis of the painting as a counterpoint to objections raised by Stevens concerning the origin of his 1937 poem titled '' The Man With the Blue Guitar'' stating,

"Despite his repeatedly denying it, Stevens does seem to have a particular painting in mind here: Picasso's 1903 ''The Old Guitarist'', which portrays an old man with white hair and beard sitting distorted and cross-legged as he plays his guitar. If Picasso attempted to portray the world of poverty and abject misery, it was because that had been his own plight as a struggling young artist in Barcelona, where he painted many pictures including this one, of the poor. The painting is almost entirely done in monochromatic blues and blue-blacks, except for the guitar itself, which is painted in a slightly warmer brown. The man is blind but, no longer seeing the world around him, he sees more deeply into the reality within."

In ''The Old Guitarist'', Picasso may have drawn upon

George Frederic Watts George Frederic Watts (23 February 1817, in London – 1 July 1904) was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said "I paint ideas, not things." Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical work ...

's 1886 painting of '' Hope'', which similarly depicts a hunched, helpless musician with a distorted angular form and predominantly blue tone.

Infrared discoveries

Recent x-rays and examinations by curators found three figures peering behind the old guitarist's body. The three figures are an old woman with her head bent forward, a young mother with a small child kneeling by her side, and an animal on the right side of the canvas. Despite unclear imagery in crucial areas of the canvas, experts determined that at least two different paintings are found beneath ''The Old Guitarist''. In 1998, researchers used an

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

camera to penetrate the uppermost layer of paint (the composition of ''The Old Guitarist'') and clearly saw the second-most composition. By using this camera, researchers were able to discover a young mother seated in the center of the composition, reaching out with her left arm to her kneeling child at her right, and a calf or sheep on the mother's left side. Clearly defined, the young woman has long, flowing dark hair and a thoughtful expression. The Art Institute of Chicago shared its infrared images with the

Cleveland Museum of Art The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian ...

and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where curator William Robinson identified a sketch by Picasso sent to his friend Max Jacob in a letter. It revealed the same composition of mother and child, but it had a cow licking the head of a small calf. In a letter to Jacob, Picasso reveals he was painting this composition a few months before he began ''The Old Guitarist''. Despite these discoveries, the reason Picasso did not complete the composition with a mother and child, and how the older woman fitted into the history of the canvas, remain unknown. In 2019, researchers at University College London used neural network to recreate the painting found by infrared camera. The neural network was trained to recreate the painting from other works of Picasso during his Blue Period.

In popular culture

As one of Picasso's more notable Blue Period works, ''The Old Guitarist'' has influenced other artists of all backgrounds. For example,

Paul McCartney Sir James Paul McCartney (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with the Beatles, for whom he played bass guitar and shared primary songwriting and lead vocal duties with John Lennon. One ...

drew from the painting when creating a chord progression. This progression and McCartney's accompanying melody were his contributions to the 2015

Kanye West Ye ( ; born Kanye Omari West ; June 8, 1977) is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and fashion designer. Born in Atlanta and raised in Chicago, West gained recognition as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records in the ea ...

song " All Day".

Notes

Sources

"Pablo Picasso's works, featuring: ''The Old Guitarist''
. 09 Mar 2011

Rep. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001. Web. 25 Feb. 2011

Web. 10 Mar. 2011 * ttp://www.theartistpablopicasso.com/pablo-picasso-painting-old-guitarist.htm "Pablo Ruiz Picasso Painting ''The Old Guitarist'' - TheArtistPabloPicasso.com" The Artist Pablo Picasso Art and Biography - Theartistpablopicasso.com. Web. 10 Mar. 2011
"Symbolism." SJSU Digital Art Lobby
Web. 10 Mar. 2011

External links

The Art Institute of Chicago: Revealing Picasso Conservation Project''The Old Guitarist'', Art-Historical Research, Art Institute of Chicago
{{DEFAULTSORT:Old Guitarist 1903 paintings 20th-century portraits Musical instruments in art Portraits by Pablo Picasso Portraits of men Paintings in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago