In Acrobat With Ball (1905), Picasso perhaps most forcefully contrasts his two alternative sexual-artistic selves. In the foreground, we see a hulking male figure whose attention is focused, as is our own, on a precariously-perched boy in the center of the painting. Picasso here speaks in the same basic symbolic language as we see in Actor with Child. Like the boy in that painting, this child’s sex is not immediately clear. Rather, he resembles the androgynous sketch of Max Jacob’s head, also from 1905. While this boy, like the other, resembles Jacob, the sensation conveyed by the painting—of a tenuous balancing act and an anticipated fall—allude to deeply felt anxieties within the artist over his own sexual ‘balancing act.’ These paintings are, after all, representative of Picasso’s struggle with his own homosexual self, represented here by the boy. The boy’s stern male observer, then corresponds to Picasso’s other ‘self,’ an artistically and (hetero)sexually virile male figure. The man seems to objectify the boy and also to be mildly scolding him, as though in rebuke of his folly. This perhaps suggests Picasso’s own self-rebuke for his affair with Jacob and a life together which Richardson describes as “pleasured” (Richardson 261).
Yet ‘pleasure’ is hardly the sensation we get from Acrobat and Young Harlequin, painted in late 1905. Rather, the painting’s somber tone may allude either to the artist’s anxiety of separation from Jacob or to Picasso’s deliberate, but perhaps reluctant, withdrawal from their relationship. Of all the boys in this series, this young harlequin appears perhaps the most enervated. His gaze carries less of a provocative import than a tragic one; he appears melancholy, wisely sad. The harlequin is yet another androgynous pseudo-likeness of Jacob; note the frilled collar which we see repeated in the head sketch of Jacob. He too appears submissive, but in this painting, he is not overshadowed by an imposing masculine counterpart. Rather, the elder acrobat to the right of the scene appears reluctant—to perform his task as artist?—and appears nearly as emaciated and weak as the boy. If we take the rose elder male to represent the virile sexual-artistic self as it has in the earlier paintings, this last work might suggest that Picasso viewed his homosexual love for Jacob as having a draining influence on him as an artist, a role which he viewed as essentially masculine, having asserted bluntly, though later in his career, that women fueled his art (Seymour).