In 1906, Picasso was ending an intense three-year sexual relationship with the openly gay French poet Max Jacob. Picasso’s letters to Jacob reveal this as a period of emotional instability for the young artist, an emotive transition we see paralleled in the paintings. Indeed George Boas suggests in his The Cult of Childhood, that we often relate such periods of personal, emotional instability to our own adolescence and perceive vital persons in our lives in ‘adolescent terms’ (Boas 34). Translating this into Picasso’s painting, it is not surprising to find, upon close inspection, that the feminine, boyish-looking Jacob, not the hypothesized “P’tit Louis,” provided the physical model for the adolescent males which Picasso painted in 1905.
Yet Picasso’s relationship with Jacob was so intimate that the paintings from this period cannot be said to be only “about” Jacob, but are, moreover, an emotional expression of self. As we progress through the series of paintings from these years, we notice that Picasso’s feminized adolescent boys undergo quite unnatural changes, becoming rapidly more virile in 1906, as though the artist only begins with a particular model—Jacob—and then improvises upon his rendering of this model to depict a separate mental archetype of ‘boy.’ The latest of these figures, painted in late 1906, seem even to become super-masculine and vaguely animal, with grosser proportions and visible musculature. They seem to anticipate the artist’s representation of himself in his later works as a bull, a muscular ‘animal,’ thus suggesting that the adolescent boys Picasso depicts might gradually come to allude to the artist’s conception of himself. In fact, the transition from the feminine ‘self’ we see in Boy with a Pipe and the other 1905 paintings to the masculine animals of 1906 suggests a critical sort of personal transformation. The earlier of these paintings reflect a self which Picasso perceived as feminine and sterile, antithetical to the essentially ‘male’ work of the artist. This, he exorcised through his depictions of frail and sexually submissive male figures, composites of a homosexual self which was simultaneously being actualized—perhaps further ‘externalizing’ his homosexual urges—in his sexual affair with Max Jacob. The rapidly transformed males of 1906 can be interpreted as depicting Jacob’s opposite: unnaturally masculine figures which suggest Picasso’s deliberate transformation of his self-conception. Particularizing his vulnerabilities into a ‘homosexual self,’ which he associated with Jacob, Picasso then sought to expel this part of himself through depictions of adolescent Jacob-like boys. Understanding the intensely personal impetus for these works, then, is critical both to understanding the transition from the Blue to the Rose periods and to understanding the complex self-sculpted persona of Picasso himself.