Picasso's La Vie at the Cleveland Museum of Art

A dead friend, a colour that takes hold

In February 1901, the painter and poet Carlos Casagemas, a close friend of Picasso's since their bohemian years in Barcelona and then Paris, takes his own life after a broken love affair. Picasso would later tell his friend and biographer Pierre Daix: "It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue." This opens the Blue Period (1901-1904), years of poverty and melancholy rendered in an almost monochrome palette. Every work discussed here hangs in the same room of the museum, Room 223, devoted to twentieth-century avant-garde art.

1. La Vie, a self-portrait hidden beneath the final layer

La Vie, painted in 1903, is considered the pinnacle of this period. An X-ray of the painting revealed that an earlier version, now invisible to the naked eye, showed Picasso himself in the place of the nude man who dominates the composition — before he replaced his own face with that of Casagemas. The change is not incidental: what the painting finally shows is no longer a disguised self-portrait, but a direct tribute to the departed friend, placed at the centre of a scene that mixes poverty, desire and mourning.

The composition sets a nude couple — the man holding a woman who seems almost to collapse against him — against a fully clothed woman holding a swaddled infant. Readings proposed over more than a century vary: a realistic scene of urban poverty, an allegory of the ages of life, or a personal meditation by Picasso on poverty and mourning. None of these readings has been confirmed by any writing from Picasso himself — the painting remains deliberately ambiguous.

2. The Harem, when blue turns to pink

The Harem, painted in spring-summer 1906, marks Picasso's shift into the Rose Period: six figures — a seated, muscular man holding a flower and a vessel, surrounded by five nude women bathing, combing their hair or stretching — bathe in warm pink and orange tones, a radical departure from the palette of La Vie painted three years earlier. Picasso made the preparatory studies for this painting during a stay in Spain with his partner Fernande Olivier, who served as his model; it is his first large-scale composition bringing together several nude figures.

Seeing both paintings in the same room makes it possible to measure, over just a few years, the scale of Picasso's shift in tone: from the mourning and poverty of blue to a more carefree sensuality, still far from the Cubism he would invent a few years later.

3. Modigliani and Matisse, two faces of women

Amedeo Modigliani's Portrait of a Woman, painted around 1917-1918, shows an unidentified sitter in the painter's characteristic style: an elongated oval face, a stretched neck, muted colours. Modigliani, who arrived in Paris in 1906, became one of the figures of the Parisian avant-garde without ever formally belonging to an organised movement, unlike his Cubist or Fauvist neighbours in the room.

Two Women, a bronze sculpture made by Henri Matisse around 1908, is the only multi-figure sculpture Matisse ever made. Inspired by a photograph published in 1907 in the ethnographic journal L'Humanité feminine, it shows two female forms in almost identical but subtly different poses — one with legs together, the other apart, their arms placed differently — so that together they present both a front and a back view of the human body at once.

4. Braque and Kupka, two paths toward abstraction

Guitar and Bottle of Marc on a Table, painted by Georges Braque in 1930, belongs to a series of large still lifes made between 1928 and 1932: a bottle of marc, a sheet of music and a bowl of fruit with two apples sit on a white tablecloth, in a rich handling, with worked surfaces where sand mixed into the paint gives an almost tactile texture.

Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors II, painted by František Kupka in 1910-11, starts instead from a figurative motif — his stepdaughter playing with a ball in a garden — which the painter found impossible to fix on canvas in its real motion. From it he drew an entirely abstract composition, broad coloured curves conveying the child's gesture and the ball's trajectory rather than their appearance: one of the very first steps toward pure abstract painting in the history of modern art. Seen next to the Braque, still tied to a recognisable object, Kupka's canvas shows just how radically different the answers to the question of representation could be within the very same decade.

5. Rouault and Vuillard, two temperaments far from Picasso's blue

Head of Christ, painted by Georges Rouault around 1937, shows a bearded face with expressive eyes, turned to the left, ringed by the thick black outlines he carried over from his apprenticeship in a stained-glass workshop — Rouault wanted it, in his own words, to be "both a sacred image and the representation of a mortal being." A devout Catholic, he set against what he saw as an increasingly materialistic society a religious painting of almost raw intensity, far from the contained melancholy of the Blue-Period Picasso hanging in the same room.

Under the Trees, painted by Édouard Vuillard in 1894, is one of nine panels from a decorative series showing children playing in the Tuileries Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne — here, a girl hides behind a tree during a game of hide-and-seek, while other figures rest to the right of the composition. Rather than a realistic scene, Vuillard builds the image from bands of colourful, decorative pattern, so that the distemper-on-fabric panel reads almost like a tapestry.

How much time

Eight works in a single room: allow close to an hour to see them all; a quarter of an hour is enough for La Vie alone — the X-ray is not visible on site, but knowing it exists changes how you read the painted faces.

Background on Casagemas and the Blue Period — 5 minutes.
La Vie (Picasso) — 10 minutes.
The Harem (Picasso) — 7 minutes.
Portrait of a Woman (Modigliani) — 6 minutes.
Two Women (Matisse) — 6 minutes.
Guitar and Bottle of Marc on a Table (Braque) — 6 minutes.
Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors II (Kupka) — 6 minutes.
Head of Christ (Rouault) — 7 minutes.
Under the Trees (Vuillard) — 7 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against the official notice of the Cleveland Museum of Art (clevelandart.org) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.

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Cleveland Museum of Art

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La Vie: the painting Picasso repainted after his friend's suicide