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,...

With a restricted palette, there are hardly any light tones at the artist's disposal. The whole picture is cast under the shroud of darkness or half-light, which is appropriate, given the painting's subject matter; one can easily imagine the scene taking place at night, in an artist's dimly lit studio at the turn of the century. Still, with these dark colors, the artist is able to render a certain depth using shade in his characters' faces. This is particularly true in the instance of the woman on the right. The shadow on her face gives the face an expression that is stone-like in its gravity; she almost looks more like a sculpture, rather than a real person. This, of course, gives the painting a feeling of eeriness, as we are not quite sure if she is meant to be a real person or a figment of the artist - perhaps the couple's - imagination.
Works Cited

Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. Picasso: Birth of a Genius. New York: Praeger, 1972.

Harris, Mark. "La Vie, 1903." 1996. Retrieved April 25, 2008 at http://web.org.uk/picasso/r3.html.

Pablo Picasso." Arthistoryarchive.com. N.D. Retrieved April 25, 2008 from www.arthistoryarchive.com.

Wattenmaker, Richard J.; Distel, Anne, et al. Great French Paintings from the Barnes

Foundation. New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1993.