did you do my paper

picasso_blum.pdf

Home >English homework help >did you do my paper

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE, BLUE PERIOD, AND BLIND FIGURES

Harold P. Blum

This paper explores early issues of separation–individuation, uncon- scious conflict, and trauma, revived and reworked in Picasso’s turbu- lent protracted adolescence. During this critical period Picasso trav- eled between Barcelona and Paris four times, from age 19 to 23. His melancholic mood, related both to separation conflict and the current realities of his uprooted life and emerging career, was expressed in his painting of emaciated, despondent figures, the predominance of monochromatic blue, and his choice of social outcasts as subjects. Of particular significance are his paintings of blind persons. Separation and loss, his depressive disposition, and his choice of blind subjects were psychologically interrelated. Picasso’s developmental transforma- tion from adolescence to adulthood, marked by his finally settling in Paris, encompassed change in his personal and artistic identity.

Pablo Picasso journeyed between his Barcelona home and Paris four times between ages 19 and 23. He went to Paris in October 1900, May 1901, and January 1902, staying for varying lengths of time. He settled permanently in Paris in April 1904, after having moved many times within the city. This paper explores Picasso’s prolonged adolescent separation and individuation process, de- velopmental challenges, unconscious conflicts, and traumas as represented in the art of his Blue Period. Previously considered overly sentimental, the Blue Period paintings are now recognized as an important innovative phase in the evolution of Picasso’s art. Particular attention, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is paid in this paper to the intriguing enigmatic paintings of the Blue Peri- od, which include blind subjects.

Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881. With his family he moved several times, to Corunna, Barcelona, and Madrid, finally settling

268 HAROLD P. BLUM

in Barcelona in 1899. Reportedly always drawing with pencils from age two onward, he later claimed that as a child he could draw like Raphael. His sister Lola, three years younger, challenged him to create drawings, requesting, for example, that he draw a dog or a donkey, beginning from any body part such as an ear or a paw. Precocious and versatile, he complied; he could easily com- pose and rearrange form and figure in space. At the Royal Acad- emy of Art in Madrid, the youthful Picasso was recognized as a prodigy, a potentially great artist. His artwork was nurtured by his father, a mediocre artist who recognized his son’s talent as far ex- ceeding his own competence. He reportedly gave his adolescent son his paints and brushes and resigned himself to modest work as an art teacher. An alternative explanation is that his father’s vi- sion had become progressively impaired, so he relinquished his work as an artist.

ADOLESCENCE

Picasso’s adolescence was hardly a moratorium, a time-out in the transition to adulthood. Rather, it was a turbulent period with in- trapsychic disturbance involving issues of self-realization, separa- tion, loyalty, rivalry, and rebellion. Childhood difficulty was ante- cedent to these adolescent conflicts around separation (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). He had a childhood school phobia, and demanded that the maid or his father take him to school, and kept one of his father’s paintings of a pigeon in class. Gedo (1980) traced Picasso’s separation conflicts to the birth of his sister Lola and the experience of a severe, virtually simultaneous earthquake in Malaga, when Picasso was three years old. The sequellae of these double childhood traumas and the subsequent death of his sister Conchita at age seven, when he was thirteen, unconsciously infiltrated Picasso’s later art. Picasso had vowed to renounce be- ing an artist if her life were spared.

Picasso’s departure from his family and homeland to a for- eign city and country meant learning a new language and culture, as well as consolidating his identity and integrating new friends into his object world. Picasso wavered between separation and connection, detachment and attachment, leaving and returning,

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 269

being independent and remaining dependent. Departing was an adolescent disengagement from past and present object relation- ships while anticipating a different and exciting future in his life and art.

It is not clear how much Picasso’s parents contributed to his adolescent dilemmas. Picasso’s narcissistic omnipotence and en- titlement were probably anchored in his parents’ narcissistic needs and expectations. During his adolescence, Picasso and his parents needed material, social, and psychological support. Ac- cording to Gilot (1964), his mother had told him that if he be- came a soldier, he would become a general; if he became a priest, he would become pope. Picasso asserted that he wanted to be an artist, and so he became “Picasso.” Although Picasso had quar- reled with his mother, who objected to his behavior, sloppy dress, and lifestyle (not unusual in adolescence), family documents have indicated a close relationship between Picasso and his mother. His mother considered him a divine gift, bestowing on him the names of numerous saints. His own narcissistic needs encom- passed a desire to gratify his mother’s narcissistic wishes and im- press her by achieving fame and fortune. His short stature—5 feet, 3 inches—has been overlooked in its impact on his adoles- cent conflicts and his compensatory grandiosity. To be so short is likely to be experienced as a narcissistic and castrating wound for an adolescent male youth. Ever concerned about his prominence in art history, Picasso dated his art from the very beginning.

Picasso seems to have been less conflicted about his sister Lola than about his parents. She had been his favorite model in early adolescence, and they maintained a separate intimacy. Con- tinuing after he was a celebrity, he would telephone her daily, or delegate the regular sibling connection to his Catalan poet/secre- tary, Sabartes. In this way, he would “touch” base with her and with home, though his return visits to Spain were rare. Picasso’s guilt over his hostility and death wishes, for example, toward his father and siblings, may be related to the theme in his art of the watchful guardian during sleep. Picasso, usually in disguise, pro- tects the sleeping woman with whom he is also identified. Possibly connected to his witnessing his sister Conchita’s slow suffocation from diphtheria, this theme may also be a disguised variant of a

270 HAROLD P. BLUM

primal scene with sexual and aggressive implications. Picasso was awake and watchful, working at night while his partners slept. He slept during the day, having to be coaxed out of bed (Gilot, 1964).

THE BLUE PERIOD

There is no distinct demarcation between late adolescence and adulthood (Arnett, 2004), and aspects of adolescence remained apparent throughout Picasso’s life. His gradual transformation from adolescent to adult was manifested in change in his personal and artistic identity. The period of transition of his move to Paris was a time of experimentation with a new self and new art. His ambivalent polarity of departure and return indicated both his adolescent vulnerability and his adult resilience. During this tran- sitional phase of life, he began to characteristically, though not exclusively, paint in monochromatic blue (especially cobalt blue and indigo). Occasional irregular dabs of green and grey were also evident. The blue paintings were actually concurrent with lesser-known erotic art in other colors, such as sepia, as well as some multicolored paintings. Some predominantly blue paint- ings had appeared in Barcelona even prior to Picasso’s first trip to Paris. Much of the Blue Period work was produced in Barcelona, as well as during Picasso’s stays in Paris, a tableaux of two cities, as he moved back and forth. While Picasso pursued his unique artis- tic path, he assimilated the work of other masters, such as Ce- zanne, Gauguin, Lautrec, Van Gogh, Munch, and others. The emaciated elongated figures of the Blue Period, with gaunt long faces and hands, were heavily influenced by El Greco and Spanish art. The paintings of these artists, however, are multicolored, not monochromatic blue. Picasso’s ambivalent travel would have reso- nated with the existential questions of Gauguin’s (1897) great painting “Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going?” which Picasso admired. One of the figures in the Gauguin painting was probably a model for one of the women in Picasso’s (1907) landmark painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

Achieving emancipation and independence was accompa- nied by emotional upheaval. His inner reactions of grief, loss, and loneliness were expressed in his melancholic blue compositions.

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 271

Identifying with social outcasts, Picasso painted the depressed, de- prived, and downtrodden. He depicted downcast mothers bur- dened with needy babies, prisoners and prostitutes, beggars and derelicts, the starved and emaciated. A number of these figures are definitely, poignantly identifiable as blind or half-blind, as I will further discuss. Gauguin’s thin brushstrokes and flattened perspective, rather than the earlier influence of Van Gogh, were incorporated into much of the Blue Period style.

While blue was always associated with sea and sky, the con- nection of blue with melancholia had long been present in both art and verbal idiom. In art and literature blue was symbolic of grave illness and death. Galle had produced a famed glass work, designated as “Blue Melancholia” (1892). While Picasso’s mono- chromatic blue might represent cognitive or affective rigidity, there was no evidence of rigidity in his compositions, nor in the fluidity of line and brushstroke. The tradition of representing renegades, prostitutes, and beggars derived from Goya and other Spanish artists, but without monochromatic blue color. Although the predominance of blue was possibly related to blue lamplight and blue-tinted photos of the time, such remote connections fail to elucidate the Blue Period. The blues of his paintings became darker in hue, and dark blue outlines became more prominent during the course of the Blue Period (Penrose, 1958, 1981).

I regard Picasso’s Blue Period art partly as his projection on canvas of attempts to master his own mourning and melancholia, alienation, and bitterness during his stressful protracted late ado- lescence. He alternated between regression and progression in response to developmental challenge. If there were times of inner desperation, there was also powerful motivation, determination, and sublimation. His artwork may have had a therapeutic func- tion, and may also have facilitated his adolescent development. How would Picasso have developed in life and art without his Blue Period?

Physical and psychological travel and increasing separateness from his original objects involved major modification in Picasso’s self and identity. This alteration was evident in his change of name. On his first trip to Paris around his nineteenth birthday, he used Ruiz, his father’s name, inconsistently. He signed his art P.

272 HAROLD P. BLUM

Ruiz Picasso. (It was traditional in Spain to use the names of both parents.) By age twenty and his second trip to Paris in 1901, his father’s name was permanently deleted from Picasso’s signature, leaving only his mother’s name. Suppositions that Ruiz was too common a name, or that the alliteration of “Pablo Picasso” pro- moted his recognition as an artist do not consider the deeper psy- chological meaning.

Like Picasso, Freud changed his name and identity during adolescence. It was his first name that he changed, however, from Sigismund to Sigmund. The adolescent name changes for both Picasso and Freud were initially inconsistent, indicative of inner conflict. Arguing with Jung about the pharaoh Akhenaten erasing his father’s name from Egyptian temples, Freud interpreted the name erasure as symbolic of parricide. Freud then fainted and later gave additional interpretations of guilt over the death of his infant brother Julius, and latent homosexual conflicts with Jung. Confirming Freud’s interpretation of parricidal fantasy in erasing a father’s name, Picasso later stated, “In art, one has to kill one’s father” (Richardson, 1991, p. 330). Picasso had ambivalently por- trayed his father as Degas in a brothel, and had visited the same brothel as his father. The brothel was located on the Calle d’ Avi- gnon, a street of Barcelona prostitution that related to the title of Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. For Picasso, elimi- nating his father’s name coincided with his creation of the “Blue Period” paintings. Repudiating his father’s influence and medio- cre art was an oedipal victory, a prelude to his becoming “Picas- so.” He unconsciously possessed his mother and identified with her creative functions, though not without unconscious guilt.

Picasso’s Blue Period was sometimes ascribed to the tragic suicide of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas. Picasso had shared a studio with Casagemas in Barcelona, and they were together on Picasso’s first Paris sojourn. After they returned to Barcelona, Pi- casso left his friend and went briefly to Madrid. Casagemas went back to Paris alone. There he committed suicide in 1901 after first threatening to murder his girlfriend Germaine. He had been ob- sessed with Germaine, who rejected his hopes for her love and marriage. Picasso, still in Spain, did not attend Casagemas’s fu- neral. His mourning his friend did not deter him from having a

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 273

brief affair with Germaine, while staying in his deceased friend’s Paris studio. (Germaine may have wanted to heap scorn and con- tempt on the man who almost killed her.) This prompt affair with Casagemas’s girlfriend in his friend’s quarters is strongly sugges- tive of victorious triumph over oedipal and sibling rivals. Picasso may simultaneously have symbolically expressed unconscious ho- mosexual love for Casagemas through his sexual relationship with Germaine.

The affair with Germaine, as well as the long delay before Pi- casso’s portrayals of Casagemas, painted many months after his suicide, indicate that the death of Casagemas was not a major de- terminant of the onset and extent of the Blue Period. However, Casagemas’s death may have in some small measure contributed to and/or exacerbated Picasso’s late adolescent depression. Casa- gemas appears as a disguised representation of Picasso in the enigmatic painting “La Vie” (1903; Figure 1). Scientific studies of the painting have revealed that Picasso covered a self-portrait with that of Casagemas. In “La Vie” a barely clothed Casagemas stares at a barefoot mother holding an infant. “La Vie” may represent Picasso’s disguised need to maintain separation and dissociation from his longing for maternal incest and nurturance. Picasso is himself the baby, and possibly the mother as well, with the father eliminated. The paintings of the deceased Casagemas and the parricidal fantasy enacted in deleting his father’s name from his signed art were chronologically convergent. The painting can also be seen as an undoing of Casagemas’s suicide, portraying him next to a nude woman who leans against him, perhaps a way of assuaging his guilt. Picasso may have projected his own melan- choly onto Casagemas’s suicidal depression in “La Vie,” as well as in other Blue Period art. Picasso’s adolescent conflicts and past traumas are expressed in “La Vie.” It may also represent the trau- matic experiences of the birth of his sister Lola, and the death of Conchita.

THE BLIND OF THE BLUE PERIOD

Blindness is a special subject of the Blue Period paintings (Ravin & Perkins, 2004). The blind figures are recurrent and usually pre-

274 HAROLD P. BLUM

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 275

dominant in Blue Period paintings such as “The Old Guitarist” (1903; Figure 2), “The Blind Man’s Meal” (1903; Figure 3), “La Celestina” (1904; Figure 4), and “The Old Jew and the Boy” (1903; Figure 5). “The Frugal Repast” (1904; Figure 6), the first etching produced in Paris, is now a black-and-white icon of Picasso’s Blue Period. In a number of paintings, drawings, and graphic works, one or both eyes are clouded or closed, that is, blind. How myste- rious, paradoxical, and disturbing that a visual artist, virtually de- pendent on sight, chooses to depict blind subjects.

In his choice of portraying the blind, however, Picasso fol- lowed past models: representations of Cupid as blind, and the art of Rembrandt and Goya (Penrose, 1981). Goya in particular had painted blind guitar players; Rembrandt had repeatedly contrast- ed light and darkness, and had painted the famed portrait of “Ar- istotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer.” While artists may also have been stimulated by literature, for example, the blind poets Homer and Milton as well as the blind Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, we have no definite information that such literature or the Bible influenced Picasso. There are literary stereotypes of the blind seer whose blindness is compensated with foresight or insight. La Ce- lestina, the subject of Picasso’s 1904 painting, was a one-eyed pro- curess in the famous drama by de Rojas (Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 1499); Picasso would have known of her history. Derrida (1993), in a seminar at the Louvre, discussed the subject of blind- ness in art from the perspectives of artist and observer, as looking but not seeing beyond biased observation. Using the defense of denial, “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”

The blind figures tend to evoke compassion, pity, and sad- ness, and perhaps reassure the spectators that they do not share in this misfortune. Yet all art has elements of ambiguity, and each spectator has a personal perception and response that may change with each exposure to the work of art. Picasso’s blue paintings did not sell during the Blue Period, prolonging his indigence, which in turn very likely contributed to his depressed mood.

Perhaps in his preconscious psyche, Picasso may have feared being overlooked or receiving only limited appreciation of his art—narcissistic injuries. Unconsciously, Picasso may have been threatened with being wrecked by success, a no-win situation. If

276 HAROLD P. BLUM

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 277

Picasso fantasized himself as blind, he could reassure himself that it was only a fantasy, that his talion fears of blindness need not become reality. Painting the blind could be counterphobic against the fear of becoming blind and losing the most valued aspect of the artist’s self. In his dialogue with the objects on the canvas, as well as with the unseen spectators of his painting, he could be re- assured of his capacity to see.

There are actually three forms of blind figures in the Blue Period: the blind, the blind with a seeing companion, and the

278 HAROLD P. BLUM

blind in one eye, or half-blind. The figures might also be consid- ered blind to the invisible spectator. In some works only blind figures are depicted. In “The Old Jew and the Boy,” the boy has seeing eyes for the blind, downcast old Jew. In “The Frugal Re- past,” the man is blind, and his similarly bony, emaciated female companion is sighted. In a variation on the theme, “La Celestina” has one seeing eye and one highly visible, opaque blind eye. Perti- nent to Picasso’s theme of blindness, Freud’s (1900) first dream in his magnum opus was associated with his father’s funeral. He dreamt he was requested to close the eyes, or close one eye, of his

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 279

280 HAROLD P. BLUM

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 281

dead father. Oedipal conflict and denial surface in the dream’s manifest content.

Picasso provided subtle compensation and/or vicarious grati- fication for some of his blind figures. “La Celestina” has one see- ing eye, and the “Old Jew” has a companion with a substitute pair of eyes. Compensation for blindness is also offered through alter- nate modes of sensory perception, as in the music of the guitarist and the touching contact of the dyadic partners. The old Guitarist is bent over his instrument, immersed in the auditory sphere of music, “a rhapsody in blue,” so important for the blind. The pro- vision of the brownish guitar is his companion, his sole support and consolation. Homer, the blind poet, sang his verses to the ancient Greeks. Picasso is reported to have said, “They should pull out the eyes of painters as they do to goldfinches to make them sing better” (Penrose, 1981, p. 91).

Was Picasso blinding rival artists to the accompaniment of their singing mournful music as in “The Old Guitarist”? “The Blind Man’s Meal” suggests the scarcity of nurturance and narcis- sistic supplies of the forlorn figures who connect through touch. At the time of the Blue Period, Picasso could be considered a so- cial critic of blind indifference to poverty, and infirmity, just as he later inveighed against the atrocities of Franco s fascism in his painting “Guernica” (1937). These works of art were both self- referential and searing studies of social tragedy. Although much of Picasso’s art was deeply personal and quasi-autobiographical, his multiple frames of reference encompassed social, cultural, and historical perspectives.

Picasso himself did not comment about the meaning of his depiction of the blind in his Blue Period. He did, however, refer to one of his Blue Period paintings that portrayed a blind subject (1903, letter in Barnes Museum, Philadelphia): “I am painting a blind man at the table. He holds some bread in his left hand and grasps with his right hand for a jug of wine.” A religious interpre- tation of the painting invokes the Eucharist: The bread and the wine are symbolic of Christ’s body and blood, and his concern for the poor and the needy on whom society turned a blind eye. Christ healed the blind and fed the hungry. As a former altar boy instructed in Catholicism, Picasso would probably have known

282 HAROLD P. BLUM

about cures of the blind mentioned in the Bible. There is no evi- dence that Picasso made any other comment about his blind fig- ures. In painting the blind of the Blue Period, Picasso regularly framed the ocular orbit in a dark blue shadow. With their affec- tively charged simplified figures and background, the paintings comprise sensuous, emotionally interrelated compositions.

For a visual artist loss of sight would be supremely self- destructive, precluding creation and enjoyment of visual art. Dur- ing the Blue Period Picasso often wore blue clothes; he identified with both the blind and sighted figures, the damaged and intact eye. He may have felt guilty about deserting his parents, surpass- ing and devaluing his father and dreaming of surpassing revered Spanish artists of the past. Though searching for mentors is typi- cal of adolescence, “stealing” from other artists, as he told Gilot (1964), could well have been accompanied by guilt and by the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom, 2007). Picasso acquired and psy- chologically possessed the art of these masters through visual in- corporation, emulation, and identification. As in Oedipus Rex, oe- dipal victory over his masters could be unconsciously punished by blindness, representing castration, and the talion principle of “an eye for an eye.” The fear of retaliation is a major psychological determinant of the superstition of the “evil eye.” Picasso’s adoles- cent sexual activity and his erotic art may also have been associat- ed with fears of punitive blindness. (His clandestine erotic art in- cluded lovers merged in sexual union, eliminating separateness.) Masturbation was at that time considered noxious behavior, which could lead to visual and mental impairment; prostitutes could transmit venereal disease leading to blindness and ultimately death. His voyeurism–exhibitionism, also expressed in his art, was a source of gratification and guilt.

Picasso’s blind figures may represent not only the artist as blind, but also his internalized object relationships, and specta- tors. He could have erotic and artistic gratification while avoiding the inhibiting and prohibiting gaze of parental authority. If the spectators were blind, he would not be subject to their disapprov- al or devaluation, fostering artistic freedom. However, if they were blind, he would also suffer the narcissistic mortification of not gaining recognition and respect. Blindness could thus be protec-

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 283

tion against the envy and jealousy of collectors and rival artists, as well as their punishment for their lack of recognition and admira- tion.

Picasso’s figures who had one good eye or a sighted com- panion could reassure him that he retained sufficient vision, that his worst fears had not materialized. Picasso’s own penetrating gaze was repeatedly noted by friends, artists, and dealers. Claim- ing he could look straight into the sun, he could proclaim victory over blinding light. If the sun represented a father figure, as in Freud’s (1911) Schreber case, Picasso would be more powerful than the paternal masters of art with whom he competed. How- ever, if Picasso failed as an artist in his adolescent “rite of pas- sage,” he would be humiliated and might be cast among “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14). In his dialogue with his object relationships and spectators he could magically con- trol the scene, having always been superstitious and interested in magic. He could safely protect them from his blind rage by dis- sociation and displacement onto prostitutes and derelicts. While his sometimes savage portrayals of prostitutes in Barcelona gave way to more sympathetic depictions in Paris during the Blue Pe- riod, empathy and sympathy for them were often followed by re- emergence of hostility, for example, in the fearsome, primitive harlots of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Women in Picasso’s erotic art were sometimes depicted as devouring, engulfing, or castrating, dissociated from women as nurturing, alluring, or a muse.

The brooding, embittered aspects of the Blue Period were doubtless exacerbated by his frequently indigent circumstances. He was desperately short of funds beginning with his second trip to Paris in May 1901. He had to return empty-handed to Barcelo- na at Christmas, having been unable to sell his paintings for more than a pittance. Picasso was in essence one of the beggars in blue, accepting meager meals on credit. Creature comforts and public recognition of his art were in very short supply during the Blue Period, threatening his self-confidence and self-esteem. Neverthe- less, with his perseverance and talent, he gradually succeeded in situating himself in the center of the international avant garde art community in Paris.

284 HAROLD P. BLUM

FROM ADOLESCENCE TO YOUNG ADULTHOOD

Picasso emerged into adulthood after his prolonged adolescence. Enduring aspects of adolescence remained embedded in his adult personality. His adolescent characteristics, probably with a per- ceptually and artistically gifted neurobiological endowment, may have facilitated his elastic changes of style and form. The adoles- cent brain undergoes a second pruning of neurons, and the per- sonality undergoes varying changes while childhood conflicts and trauma are revived, transformed, and reorganized. Adolescence with its psychic and psychological changes cannot merely be the past repeated. Striving toward independence in life and art con- verged in Picasso’s Blue Period, with intermittent mourning and melancholia for his largely relinquished original objects. The art of the Blue Period cannot simply be explained by depression as the sole determinant. As in later phases of life, Picasso was prolif- ic, highly innovative, and socially involved. He did not display withdrawal, anhedonia, nihilism, or lack of communication, or complain of lack of meaning in life. In his affair with Germaine and ongoing contacts with prostitutes, Picasso did not display the loss of interest in sexual activity characteristic of severe depres- sion.

During the Blue Period Picasso also produced erotic art in other colors. His late adolescence was a time of further integra- tion and consolidation of his sexual identity and unconscious bi- sexuality. In his erotic art there are female figures with a phallus, and females with testicles within female genitals. It is not known whether Picasso experimented with overt homosexuality, not un- common during adolescence. He had camped out and slept be- side his close friend, Manuel Pallares, in rural Spain. Several years later when Picasso, Pallares, and Casagemas were staying with three women in the same apartment in Paris in late 1900, the inti- macy of their heterosexual activity also suggested their latent ho- mosexuality (Mailer, 1995). His friend Max Jacob was a torment- ed 25-year-old homosexual French poet/painter when he met Picasso in 1901. Jacob admired Picasso’s art at first sight, and pro- vided much needed emotional and material support. They soon shared bed and board, initially communicating in sign language,

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 285

having no common spoken language. Jacob taught Picasso French language and literature, and remained a close friend. Picasso was always avidly, overtly heterosexual, and his late adolescent chal- lenges were not primarily related to problems of sexual identity. During this transitional period Picasso sought both old Spanish friends and new French friends. Claims that the Blue Period was precipitated by Picasso’s blue portrait of his slavish friend Jaime Sabartes (later his ever-devoted secretary) do take into account the complex determinants of the Blue Period. Sabartes’s pres- ence in Paris during the Blue Period was particularly valuable for his lavish adulation and his subjugated responses to Picasso’s moods and requests.

Did Picasso’s prolific artistic activity defend against depres- sion and unacceptable sexual and aggressive impulses? His high level of artistic activity and social activity, such as carousing with friends and frequently attending the circus with them, could sug- gest hypomania. Were there also cyclothymic tendencies in Picas- so’s juxtaposition or alternation of depressive and erotic art, as well as reversal of day and night activities? Consistent with possi- ble cyclothymia, the Blue Period was succeeded by the Rose Peri- od. Cyclothymic tendencies may have been an inherent feature of his personality.

DISCUSSION

Prolonged adolescence might be considered as contributing to creativity in many gifted persons. Having an enduring adolescent openness to exploration, experimentation, and risk taking may be a frequent though not necessarily universal characteristic of creative individuals. Adolescent separation and rebellion against conventional parental authority may foster departure from tradi- tion toward new directions and imaginative innovation. Freud (1905) referred to the detachment of adolescence as “one of the most significant, but also one of the most painful psychical ac- complishments of the pubertal period—a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the prog- ress of civilization, between the new generation and the old” (p. 227). Picasso and those rare persons who have transformed the

286 HAROLD P. BLUM

history of art and science may often be permanent adolescents, at least in the creative dimension of their personalities. Fostering creative potential, the oppositional attitude of many adolescents favors the further development of self-definition and identity. Pi- casso’s adolescent-phase struggle over independence may have promoted new creative compromise solutions in the artistic devel- opment of the youthful Picasso (Blum, 2010).

The Blue Period ended with Picasso finding new love, a live- in girlfriend, Fernande Olivier (la Belle Fernande), his own stu- dio, and a group of admiring, devoted French friends. “La bande à Picasso,” who were not rival visual artists, provided mirroring, companionship, helpful acculturation, and enthusiastic support. These friends, especially Max Jacob, Apollinaire, and André Salm- on achieved literary recognition, parallel to their artist hero be- coming prominent. In the context of this group Picasso was free to work and play. From a negative perspective, one might say that Picasso’s narcissistic needs were overgratified. This was a persis- tent character issue evident throughout his life, accentuated by his relatively early recognition and a lifetime of fame and acclaim.

Picasso remained in France, but never became a French citi- zen. Nevertheless, his deep Spanish roots were apparent as he continued to enjoy Spanish music, dance, and bullfights in France, and donated a treasure trove of his art to the Picasso museum, in Barcelona and” Guernica” to the Prado museum in Madrid. He remained attached to his former home at an optimal distance, with infrequent direct contact with Spanish family and friends.

In terms of psychological development, the Blue Period marked Picasso’s transition from adolescence to adulthood, al- though aspects of adolescence persisted throughout his life, with both positive and negative effects. His artistic genius was becom- ing apparent during this period as he supplanted more conven- tional works with art that became increasingly original. Both his personal and artistic identities achieved new integration.

REFERENCES

Arnett, J. (2004). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PICASSO’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE 287

Bloom, H. (2011) The anatomy of influence. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Blum, H. (2010). Adolescent trauma and the Oedipus complex. Psychoanal. Inq., 30:548–556.

Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the blind; The self portrait and other ruins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey, ed. and trans., The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vol- umes. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974. 4:

______ (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard ed., 7: ______ (1911). Psychoanalytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of

paranoia. Standard ed., 12: Gedo, M. (1980). Picasso—Art as autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press. ______ (1994). Looking at art from the inside out: The psychoiconographic approach to

modern art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilot, F., with Lake, C. (1964). Life with Picasso. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mahler, M., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the human

infant. New York: Basic Books. Mailer, N. (1995). Portrait of Picasso as a young man. New York: Atlantic Monthly

Press. Penrose, R. (1958). Picasso, his life and work. New York: Harper. ______ (1981). Picasso, perception, and blindness. Paris: Museum, 33:193. Ravin, J., & Perkins, J. (2004). Representation of blindness in Picasso’s Blue

Period. Arch. Opthalmology, 122(4):636–639. Richardson, J. (1991). A life of Picasso, vol. 1. New York: Random House.

23 The Hemlocks The Psychoanalytic Review Roslyn Estates, NY 11576 Vol. 100, No. 2, April 2013 E-mail: [email protected]

copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.