Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga in Spain, on October, the 25th of 1881. He was a spanish painter, draftman and sculptor. It's Pablo Picasso who invented the cubism with George Braque, another surrealist. Several periods marked his life, like the bleu period, the pink period, the african period, and of course, the cubism period. There was also the period of the surrealism, the period of the civil war in Spain when he painted Guernica, and then there was a period when he got involved in the communist party.
Picasso painted a lot of pictures, among them, there were some auto portraits.
This picture above was realised in gouache. This auto portrait of Picasso was painted during the painter's so called "blue period" (1901-1904). In fact we can notice that, on this portrait, the colour blue was very dominant. This period reveals that Picasso 's work was at that time marked by old age, death and poverty. The blue Picasso uses for his pictures was very dark, commonplace, monotonous and, so, very sad. And, when we know Picasso's life, we can understand the origin of these lugubrious pictures. In fact, during this blue period, Picasso had to overcome the sucide of his spanish friend, Carlos Casagemas. So, his first picture of the blue period was "la mort de Casagemas". The following pictures of this period often describe beggars, blind and poor persons. They are very typical of Picasso's frame of mind in this period : he was facinated by misery, hurt by disappointments.Therefore we can add, Picasso's Blue Period expresses a lot of melancholy.
When I look at this picture, I see a man. Just a man. He looks sad, morose, a man who lost any hope. He seems very dark. I think his life was a sort of mixture between boring routine and confinment in deep sadness. So, he's imprisoned in the worship of the death, of the misfortunes of life.
If we consider Pablo Picasso's case, we can answer to one of the questions : portraits often reflect a part of the artist's life and are influenced by it.
