The Old Guitarist

The Old Guitarist is one of the defining works of Pablo Picasso's Blue Period, the years from about 1901 to 1904 when he painted the poor, the blind and the outcast in shades of blue. He made it in Barcelona in late 1903 or early 1904, when he was 22. Painted in oil on a panel about 122.9 by 82.6 centimeters, it has been in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1926, part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.

What you are looking at

An old man sits cross-legged on the ground, hunched so far forward that his head hangs almost at the level of his shoulders. His eyes are closed or sightless, his mouth slack. He is skeletally thin: his collarbone and the tendons of his neck stand out, his arms are long and bony, and one bare foot protrudes at the bottom of the picture.

He holds a large guitar close against his body, his left hand stretched along the neck and his right hand curled over the strings. The guitar is the only warm color in the painting, a soft brown that glows against the blues. Everything else, his ragged clothes, the wall behind him and the ground beneath, is painted in tones of blue and blue-green, with gray-white for his skin and hair.

The figure is distorted. His upper body seems to lean back while his legs are folded beneath him, and his limbs are elongated, a deliberate echo of the sixteenth-century Spanish painter El Greco.

Look closely at the area around the man's neck. Faint shapes show through the blue: the head of a woman and other forms from an earlier composition Picasso painted over. Technical examination has revealed them clearly.

Meaning

Picasso's Blue Period followed the suicide in 1901 of his close friend Carles Casagemas, and coincided with his own poverty in Paris and Barcelona. His blind beggars and musicians are often read as images of suffering, isolation and endurance, but also of art itself. Blindness had a long association with inner vision, from the poet Homer to the blind seers of Symbolist literature, and the guitarist plays though he cannot see.

The monochrome blue, the color of night and melancholy, strips the scene of time and place, so that the man becomes a universal figure rather than a portrait.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, among its galleries of modern European art. It inspired the poet Wallace Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (1937). See also Picasso's Girl before a Mirror, Weeping Woman and Le Rêve, and the Pablo Picasso page.