.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work is one of a group of important early works from Picasso's Blue Period showing a young mother and infant. The series was inspired by Picasso's visits in the autumn of 1901 to Saint-Lazare, a penal institution in Paris for fallen women. As John Richardson has written:
Like most visitors, Picasso was appalled by the presence of children in the prison; hence so many Saint-Lazare images have to do with motherhood. It did not take Picasso long to idealize and stylize these sullen-looking women into mannerist Madonnas of exquisite sensibility and serenity, whose faces and hands and babies are all of extreme attenuation... The mothers are as prettified in their way as the peasant Madonnas that sanctified poverty in seventeenth-century Spain and Italy. (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, New York, 1991, p. 222)
With the exception of the pictures representing his dead friend Casagemas, this series was Picasso's first extended essay in the Blue Period. According to Picasso's friend and biographer Sabarts, the painter at the beginning of the Blue Period was obsessed with the idea that
...art emanates from Sadness and Pain... Sadness lends itself to mediation... grief is at the basis of life. We are passing through... a period of grief, of uncertainty that every one regards from the viewpoint of his own misery... a period of sadness and of misery. Life with all its torments is at the core of [Picasso's] theory of art... The painter has been able to give form to a sigh, to make inert bodies breathe, to infuse life into the dead. (Quoted in ibid., p. 217)
Like most visitors, Picasso was appalled by the presence of children in the prison; hence so many Saint-Lazare images have to do with motherhood. It did not take Picasso long to idealize and stylize these sullen-looking women into mannerist Madonnas of exquisite sensibility and serenity, whose faces and hands and babies are all of extreme attenuation... The mothers are as prettified in their way as the peasant Madonnas that sanctified poverty in seventeenth-century Spain and Italy. (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, New York, 1991, p. 222)
With the exception of the pictures representing his dead friend Casagemas, this series was Picasso's first extended essay in the Blue Period. According to Picasso's friend and biographer Sabarts, the painter at the beginning of the Blue Period was obsessed with the idea that
...art emanates from Sadness and Pain... Sadness lends itself to mediation... grief is at the basis of life. We are passing through... a period of grief, of uncertainty that every one regards from the viewpoint of his own misery... a period of sadness and of misery. Life with all its torments is at the core of [Picasso's] theory of art... The painter has been able to give form to a sigh, to make inert bodies breathe, to infuse life into the dead. (Quoted in ibid., p. 217)