The Early Picasso

Throughout the Blue period, Picasso depicted the material deprivation and psychological suffering of people on the margins of society, before turning, in 1905 (when he had settled in Paris), to the themes of the Rose period: jugglers, acrobats and harlequins. In the summer of 1906, Picasso spent several weeks in the Spanish Pyrenees, where he produced a profusion of paintings and sculptures uniting classical and archaic ideals of the body. His increasing deformation and fragmentation of the figure throughout this period--apparent in the primitivist pictures, especially the female nudes--heralded the emergence of the new pictorial language of cubism.

The works of the Blue and Rose periods have a universal appeal and poignancy. Existential themes--life, love, sexuality, fate and death--find embodiment in the delicate beauty of young female and male figures, and in depictions of children and of old people scarred by life, whose rendering by Picasso shows happiness and joy, but also loneliness and melancholy.