One might suggest that the paintings, tending toward an overt idolization of the masculine form, represent the merely physical dimension of the artist’s homosexual desire and indeed, in their overtly sexual nature, suggest an increased sexual honesty or liberation denied in the tight-fitting clothes of earlier figures. Yet such an interpretation neglects the diminished emotional vibrancy of the later paintings from this period. While the figures emerge as sexually more clearly defined, they are emotionally less so, reflecting the artist’s own clear sexual redefinition, achieved at the emotional cost of his unique intimacy with Max Jacob.
Ultimately, Picasso depicts his homosexual self and his life with Max Jacob in perpetual adolescence, that is to say, as a period of extreme emotion and thrilling self-awareness which yet had to be outgrown and left behind. Returning to Boy with a Pipe, we become aware that it is a psychological less than a sexual fatigue that makes the image of the boy so compelling, so disturbing. He seems almost disjoined from his body, his thoughts and emotions escaping from his form into an aureole of flowers. Whereas we are aware only of a physical presence in the later paintings, here we encounter only an emotional presence, the body and its artifice, abandoned. The inspiration for this image appears to have been Picasso’s emotional relationship with Jacob, not some sexual urge thrust onto the unwitting subject Richardson proffers in “P’tit Louis.” Picasso was not a pedophile; neither was he categorically a ‘homosexual.’ Rather, he struggled because he was, as the artist himself would say, ‘Picasso.’ His conception of self was so disembodied from himself, from his actual needs and pleasures, that the sculpting of the Picasso persona—his ultimate masterpiece—consumed him. Out of the sudden vigor of Picasso’s modernity and the emotional sterility of his own life, the adolescent paintings invoking Jacob express, in captive blue images, what could not be expressed as love. 