III.

The Blue Period

In 1900 Picasso made his first visit to Paris, the goal of every ambitious artist, and for the next four years he divided his time between there and Barcelona. He found the bohemian street-life of Paris fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafés show how he assimilated the Post-Impressionism of Paul Gauguin and of the Symbolist painters called the Nabis. The themes he found in the work of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the style of the latter, exerted the strongest influence. Picasso’s Blue Room (1901, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) reflects the work of both these painters and, at the same time, shows his evolution towards the Blue Period, so called because various shades of blue, well suited to the melancholic subjects that he favoured at that time, dominated his work for the next few years (1901-1904). Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind people, beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of the style of El Greco.