Picasso\'s La Vie Pablo Picasso\'s

Picasso's La Vie

Pablo Picasso's La Vie (1903)

La Vie is a painting executed by the young Pablo Picasso when he was only twenty-two years old. It is one of the more famous examples of the artist's Blue period. This period was at least partly inspired by the suicide of his good friend Casedemas (Picasso, quoted in arthistoryarchive.com). During this period, the artist used an almost exclusively blue and green palette. It was painted at a time of transition for the young Picasso, when he was moving constantly between Barcelona and Paris, unsure of where he really belonged. His biographers have described this period in his life as a time of isolation, unhappiness, poverty, and despair. All of these wretched emotions were depicted on canvas in shades of blue, and in La Vie, we see perhaps Picasso's most direct tribute to his deceased friend.

In the foreground of the painting, we see three figures. To the left is a man, who has the face of Casedemas, standing nude except for a loincloth. A nude woman, with a slightly protruding belly, suggesting the possibility of pregnancy, stands next to him, with her head and arms resting on his shoulder for support. The man has a firm, but melancholy expression on his face. He extends one figure forward, as though to emphasize a point, to the woman forming the other half of this foreground scene, who is standing on the left side of the picture. Unlike the other two, she is fully clothed, except for her bare feet. She is wearing a white blouse and is wrapped in a dark blue-green shawl that covers her entire body. She holds a sleeping baby in her arms, wrapped in a white cloth. The figures seem to be standing in an artist's studio, as in the background, one can make out two canvases, one of which features a nude man holding a nude female figure in his arms, who is apparently sobbing. Beneath that, one can make out another canvas with a drawing of a female figure sitting, with her head bent towards her knees, also in a state of anguish.

It has been established that this is a painting that Picasso heavily worked on, edited, and changed over time. Preparatory sketches for this painting have revealed the fact that the male artist in the picture was originally meant to be Picasso himself (Harris). In the original drawings, the male figure had his arm raised up in a gesture of defiance, suggesting famous crucifixion images. Perhaps, then, the original meaning of the painting for Picasso was meant to be the artist's persecution at the hands of fate, as symbolized by the clothed woman with the baby - a sign of what the young, pregnant nude woman would one day become.

La Vie must be understood in the wider context of Picasso's Blue period. It is unclear when, exactly, the Blue period began for Picasso. It was either begun in Spain in the spring of 1901 or in Paris later that year (Cirlot 127). A mood of gloom and depression pervades all these paintings, yet there is also a lot of projection of the artist himself in these works, as evidenced by the fact that Picasso originally intended to paint himself in La Vie. But it is ultimately Casedemas who wound up in the painting, the culmination of a series of portraits of Casedemas. This is the last one that Picasso would complete, hinting at the fact that, in this image, he finally came to terms with the death of his friend (Wattenmaker and Distel 304). The following year, Picasso would wrap up the Blue Period with his Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

The man and woman to the left of the painting appear to be very concerned about their fate. Theirs seems to be a tragic love, doomed to some inevitably bleak conclusion, and the lovers seem to be aware of this. One possible interpretation is that the clothed woman is not meant to represent fate at all. Perhaps, instead, she is the wife of the artist in the picture, and the young pregnant woman he is with is his mistress. In that case, then the second woman has exposed the infidelity of the two young lovers, hence the distressed expression on the man's face. Still, another interpretation has it that the clothed woman is the mother of the girl that the artist is having an affair with. He has impregnated her daughter, and she has arrived to confront him and bring her daughter home. The girl stands by her lover, however, and the artist, in a gesture of defiance, must stand his ground in asserting his moral right to protect the girl in the face of parental authority.

What makes the painting a quintessential Picasso work, however, are the accomplished formal qualities one finds when examining it up close. Picasso's rendering of the two nude figures reveals a classical painterly understanding of the human anatomical form. With a restricted palette, Picasso nevertheless manages to capture the paleness of both figures' skin, the contortions in the male's stressed figure as he extends a finger in warning the clothed female, and the woman's protruding belly - all details rendered realistically and true to life. Perhaps the only "awkward" detail on the bodies is the clumsy squarishness of the feet. It could also be argued, however, that this detail asserts the painterliness of the composition, thus reminding the viewer that what we are looking at is not real life, but a scene from the imagination of the artist.