"La Vie"

Paper Summary:

"La Vie" is a painting executed by the young Pablo Picasso when he was only twenty-two years old. This paper examines how it is one of the more famous examples of the artist's blue period and how, during this period, the artist used an almost exclusively blue and green palette. It looks at how 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 and how his biographers have described this period in his life as a time of isolation, unhappiness, poverty, and despair. It also analyzes how all of these wretched emotions are depicted on canvas in shades of blue.

From the Paper:

"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. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. Picasso: Birth of a Genius. New York: Praeger, 1972.
• Harris, Mark. "La Vie, 1903." 1996. Retrieved April 25, 2008 from: 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.

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