The man who became Picasso

The Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition, “Becoming Picasso,” contains two self-portraits of Picasso, both from the year 1901, both entitled Yo. The first was the standout work at the artist’s debut exhibition with the dealer Ambroise Vollard: an audacious, bright figure on a dark background, a variegated palette in one hand resembling the moving cape of a bullfighter. The second is of a jaundiced head, hanging over a few jagged lines that indicate the possibility of shoulders, a collar or a pocket handkerchief. The artist’s eyes have widened; they look haunted.

The Courtauld exhibition focuses on one year in the life of the young Picasso, and the exhibit’s 18 paintings occupy two small rooms at the top of the gallery. Though the paintings are few, they are well-chosen, and capture all the prolific energy and emotional turmoil of that year of Picasso’s life.

At 19, Picasso made his second trip to Paris in advance of his show with Vollard. In only a few months he prepared 64 works, finishing two or three canvases a day, halting only to discuss his works with a close circle of friends or to visit his lover, Germaine Gargallo. The first room of the Courtauld exhibition contains ten of theses paintings. His aesthetic engagement with the preceding generation of artists—Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas—is evident on all the canvases.

The largest painting reinvents Degas’ favourite subject: Dwarf Dancer (La Nana) depicts a dwarf ballerina, arm akimbo, her face a blue-grey, rouged at the cheeks and lips. Her dress, and the background behind her, are a brilliant speckle of colours somewhere between the pointillism of Seurat and the myopia of the impressionists. Nearby, the swirling, textured style of a painting of The French Can-Can evokes the movement of Van Gogh, while the theme, la vie bohème, is inescapably that of Toulouse-Lautrec.

In the next room, the dazzling, frenetic brushwork of Picasso’s Cabaret Period gives way to bolder lines, melancholy subjects, and the beginning of his Blue Period; the figures of Mother and Child, Harlequin and Companion and Absinthe Drinker are indicative of his new preoccupations.

In The Tub (The Blue Room) a bent, blond figure washes herself from a jug, standing nude before a bed with yellowed sheets. On the wall is a poster of another blonde, dancing gaily in a flowing dress—Toulouse-Lautrec’s May Milton. Picasso turns Lautrec’s English dancer into the ideal that his new subject, the impoverished and the melancholy, will never attain.

On the far wall of this room are two portraits of Picasso’s friend Carles Casegamas. When Picasso travelled to Paris for the first time in 1900, it was with Casegamas. The two returned to Spain together in December, but Picasso left his friend to travel on alone to Madrid. Carles returned to Paris and, less than three weeks later, shot himself. He was at the Café de L’Hippodrome, attempting to convince Germaine Gargallo, the woman who would soon become Picasso’s lover, to marry him. Failing to win her hand, Caselgas decided to shoot her. Missing her, he turned the gun on himself.

Both of the portraits of Casegamas are blue, and Picasso would later say that the young poet’s death inspired his blue period. The excellence of the exhibition is how it articulates the stages of Picasso’s move into melancholy. The death of Casegamas hangs over all the paintings in the collection, from the impudence of his takes on Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas to the melancholic, blue figures that he would spend the next two years of his life painting. The size of the exhibition is one of its assets—it focuses in on a small, prolific period in the life a man whose work would in many ways define art in the 20th century.

Becoming Picasso is at the Courtauld Gallery until 27th May