Behind 'Boy With a Pipe'

Brett Masters, Princeton Class of 2008
Winner of the Quin Morton Essay Prize

In May 2004, Sotheby’s of New York sold Pablo Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe (1905) to an anonymous private collector for $104 million, making it the most valuable painting ever sold. Most art critics attributed the painting’s value not to its peculiarities, but to a prime auction market and an appreciation of the Picasso brand in recent years (Baker E1). Yet Boy with a Pipe is undeniably provocative, raising questions both about Picasso’s sexuality and his relationships with children. In it, the artist depicts a lanky and vaguely feminized adolescent boy holding an opium pipe. The boy is clearly intoxicated and his pose is sexually suggestive: his legs are spread, his groin, prominent. The homoeroticism at work in the painting seems to suggest homosexual or even pedophilic desires. Moreover, a look at Picasso’s oeuvre reveals that Boy with a Pipe is only one of a series of works from 1905 and 1906, on the hinge of his blue and rose periods, which depict effeminized, almost androgynous, adolescent males in vaguely sexual positions. Upon closer inspection, each figure appears in fact to be only a different rendering of the same boy, compelling us to wonder if Picasso, a renowned philanderer, was not also a pedophile. Just who was this eroticized boy and what was the nature of his relationship with the twentieth century’s most celebrated artist?

The prevailing theory is proffered by Picasso’s friend and authoritative biographer, John Richardson. In the first volume of his A Life of Picasso, Richardson identifies the boy as “P’tit’ Louis,” a figure Picasso referred to in an interview in 1966 as a boy who regularly visited his Bateau Lavoir studio in Paris. According to Picasso, the boy “stayed there, sometimes the whole day. He watched me work. He loved that. And he died in the prime of his delinquent life” (qtd. Richardson 340). Richardson was the first person to use this quote from Picasso to identify the 1905-1906 model as “P’tit Louis,” and most subsequent scholars have deferred to his authority on the subject. In a telephone interview, Richardson explained that “Picasso was fascinated by the idea of androgynous youth,” as celebrated by the then popular cult of Arthur Rimbaud, a gay poet whose career ended at the age of twenty and who was the under-age lover of the elder writer, Paul Verlaine. At the turn of the century, the Parisian artistic community held Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine as a sort of sacred artistic ideal. As such, Richardson believes Picasso drew inspiration for Boy with a Pipe from an erotic poem Verlaine wrote about Rimbaud called “Crimen Amoris,” which talks about an adolescent “evil angel” wearing a halo of flowers, and which must, Richardson suggests, have called to mind Picasso’s own relationship with “P’tit Louis” (Richardson). Even Sotheby’s cited Richardson’s interpretation in its auction catalogue for Boy With a Pipe in 2004 (Lot 7 Catalogue).Yet Picasso did not refer to P’tit Louis as a model and Richardson has presented no evidence to suggest that Picasso was attracted to the boy—who is recalled only once, in a series of interviews conducted when the artist was in his eighties. More importantly, Richardson overlooks a vital transformation—and a vital character—in Picasso’s life in 1905 and 1906 as he moved from his so-called 'Blue Period' to the Rose: Max Jacob.

Table of Contents
page 1 (who?)
page 2 (love?)
page 3 (sketching)
page 4 (painting picasso, seeing jacob)
page 5 (enervation)
page 6 (the end of something)
conclusion

works cited
about the author

Gallery
picasso & his children
sketching max jacob
max jacob
picasso & the minotaur