Picassos La Vie
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Picasso's "La Vie" (1903)
When Picasso returned to Barcelona, a deep and significant change took place in his painting. This change strikes us first of all in his choice of colors: the variable range of brilliant tones yields to a single dark and oppressive blue.
But this transformation in his painting - the first in a long series - was more than a mere change in color, more than the adoption of a new tonality. It was above all the result of a new attitude toward people(Duane, 29).
Instead of observing them ruthlessly and satirically, he now treated his models with sympathy, with melancholic tenderness. His subjects changed, too. Instead of painting caf scenes, Parisian interiors with women in big hats seated at tables and drinking, he began to represent, to imagine enigmatic, emaciated figures standing rigid and silent against a vague or empty background.
These men and women no longer evoke contemporary life, they have nothing in common with the tense, nervous atmosphere of Paris at the beginning of this century; they are beggars, blind men, and poor street artists, transformed by the painter's compassionate and affectionate vision into almost mythical figures that belong to no particular, or familiar, epoch.
The atmosphere seems to be of solitude, hunger, and everyday misery.
And this spiritual atmosphere is suggested not only by the angular lines of the emaciated bodies, but above all by the sad, distressing color, the subdued blue, which dominates the pictorial space and the figures by its remote and silent unreality...