Yet the Minotaur, in his confused helplessness, also alludes to the emotional vulnerabilities underlying the artist's powerful exterior persona. The likenesses suggest that he needed women in his later life, required their 'guidance.' Interestingly, the Minotaur's blindness also recalls the metaphoric blindness of the black-eyed male actor in Picasso's 1905 Actor & Child. Unlike the blind Minotaur who is tamed by girls, the actor in Actor & Child is depicted as a sexual predator ready to prey upon a young boy, perhaps suggesting sexual appetites which were directed not toward females, but towards males.

Picasso already seems to hint an 'animal' motif in the exaggerated musculature and stretched neck of his first Nude Young Boy, but he explores the horse�a 'Minotaur prototype' that would appear in some of his works from the twenties�as symbol even more fully in Boy Leading a Horse (1906), in which an adolescent male nude of similarly muscular, symmetrical form is depicted leading a horse across an empty plane. This was the Picasso's first full scale to include a horse (Cowling). The foreground of the painting is rose, the background a dark gray-blue, suggesting that both the virile boy and the horse, as symbol, are just emerging from the shadowy ambiguities of Picasso's life with Jacob. At the time, Picasso had moved in with his mistress Fernande Olivier in Gósol and into what must have seemed a more clearly virile role himself (Cowling). Elizabeth Cowling writes in Picasso and Greece, that the boy's body in this painting seems "a visible incarnation of a search for harmony," the harmony, it seems, of the artist's own sexual identities (Cowling). This echoes the sexually-charged 'balancing act' of the boy in Acrobat With Ball. Identity in this painting, however, is secure. Cowling refers to the boy as in "monumental stasis" likening his figure to the Greek warrior-statue Kouros (Cowling). The harmony and stability of this painting reflect Picasso's own attempt to achieve a stable, harmonious, and virile sexual-artistic self and the introduction of the horse alongside Picasso's kouros-self introduces the horse as symbol.

Ultimately, however, the Minotaur also represents the mature Picasso, the self-sculpted persona of the artist at the end of his tumultuous career. The "blind beast" is something to be desired, something idolized in his paintings over the course of many years, particularly in the 1930's and 1940's.

"Naturally then," Jacob writes, "Picasso came to live in my room, boulevard Voltaire, on the fifth floor. It was a vast room. Picasso painted all night. And when I was getting up to go to work at the department store, he was going to bed to get some rest" (Kamber 14). But, as Picasso's biographer, John Richardson writes, this was in fact a myth the two men would create to conceal the intimate, romantic relationship that developed between them over the course of their years together (Richardson 260).

Jacob would again mention the "vast room" they shared in a poem scrawled on the back of a 1906 sketch of himself done by Picasso, Etude d'homme, drawn just before Picasso moved out. It reads, "the house where my beloved lived" (Seckel 48). Clearly, their relationship was, at least for Jacob, profoundly intimate.

But who exactly was Max Jacob? And to what degree might his own tumultuous adolescence have influenced Picasso's 'adolescent' depictions of Jacob and the emotions the young poet represented?

Five years Picasso's senior, Jacob was born in Quimper, Brittany in July 1876. His parents were Alsatian Jews; his father was a tailor and part-time antiques dealer whose income did not afford the family leisure, but did make it possible for Jacob to receive an education. The young Jacob was understood to be exceptionally bright from a young age but also to be "inordinately sensitive" and sickly, frequently making him the subject of physcial and emotional abuse from schoolyard peers and from his mother whom he later wrote was chronically "nervous and impatient"(Kamber 11). One biographer writes of the melancholy air the young poet had developed by adulthood, "Max already had his sadness from birth. Often he was beaten. At the age of twenty-four he received his last slap from his mother for having made a spelling error" (Kamber 21).

Forced from his home by feelings of abuse and inadequacy, Jacob first attempted to join the army. He writes of the attempt:
The inefficiency of my efforts to collaborate in the exercises of the barracks exhausted the patience of those who were directing them and when the benevolent vigilance of the military authorities interrupted my tasks at the end of six weeks in order to spare me further trouble, I better dissimulated embarassment at having been relieved of my responsibilities than my chiefs their joy at having acquitted themselves of theirs (Seckel 18).

After his release from the military in 1897, Jacob moved to Paris where he earned a living by giving piano lessons and shared an apartment with another friend, "as poor as he," the poet Andre Breton, and took evening courses at the Academie Jullian. (Kamber 13). Jacob also shaved his head, which, with his pale complexion and effeminate manner, gave the artist the vaguely androgynous semblance we see in Picasso's sketches. He later took a (moonlighting) job at the literary journal, Gaulois as an art critic, providing his entre into Parisian artistic circles and eventually to Pablo Picasso. When he met Picasso in 1901, he had gone freelance, quitting the Gaulois in order to "perfect his style" and begin work as a poet himself.

In 1922, Jacob wrote of this period "then began that life of privation and suffering which today is mine" (Kamber 27). Does this remark reflect a sense of "privation and suffering" that lingered after Jacob's split with Picasso, when the two remained intimates only in their frequent letters? Or is it a reflection on the hopes, fears, and baggage of those years leading up to his relationship with Picasso? In any case, we must consider Jacob's 'quest' from Brittany to Paris, from an abusive world to an embracing but destitute one, in order to understand the figure in Picasso's 1905-1906 images.

Yet examining the sketches closely, one notices firstly the casual latitude of motion exhibited by the model. The sketches depict what appears to be the same male figure in a variety of poses, leaning against a wall, smoking, lighting a pipe, sitting, each pose struck, or at least depicted, with a physical litheness and nonchalance one might not expect of a first-time adolescent model. The model further knows how to smoke a pipe and how to hold it expertly. In one image (top left corner), he even seems to be in a sort of ecstasy with the pipe, reclining his head, eyes closed, in a pose of perfect relaxation as a cloud drifts languorously from the pipe. In yet another, we see the same figure in what appears an almost sarcastic pose (left, bottom, center): legs crossed, arms folded impatiently across his chest, the model is looking at the artist in a confident and 'knowing' gesture. The poses and postures themselves convey a sense of familiarity. Indeed in certain poses (see right, center, bottom,) the model seems almost flirtatious, as though he's playing with the pipe. It seems unlikely that such familiarity would have existed between Picasso and a Parisian working boy he barely knew and mentioned only once in his life, in his late eighties. Was this Max Jacob? In several poses, the model clearly resembles Picasso's Etude d'homme, a sketch of Jacob from the same period. The spread-legged pose in the sketch to the left is indeed similarly suggestive.

One critical clue, however, can be found in the coy pose of the sketch to the right (center, bottom). If you look closely, you can make out what seem to be long, dark eyelashes over the eyes of the model, especially over his half-closed right eye. While Picasso does not detail the model's eyes in any other part of the sketch, here the action of the eyes�half-closed, almost fluttering�is critical to explaining the model's coy pose. The sketch certainly conveys a sense of playfulness and humor. Max Jacob's eyelashes were famously long and dark. Indeed, wearing his head clean-shaven at the time, they seem to have proven his most salient features! Both by Picasso and by Jean Cocteau caricature Jacob's eyelashes in their sketches of him (see below, right).

The emotional import of Boy with a Pipe for Picasso also becomes clear in André Salmon's narration of the artist's final touches:

One night, Picasso abandoned the company of his friends and their intellectual chit-chat. He returned to his studio, took the canvas he had abandoned a month before and crowned the figure of the lad with roses. He made his work a masterpiece thanks to a sublime whim. (Sotheby's 4).

Here, we might consider the nature of the models Picasso would depict throughout his life. Of the nearly 200 paintings of children he finished, all but a handful were of his own (Spies). Most of his female models were lovers. Picasso's daughter, Maya Picasso, speculates that it was through his art that Picasso "caressed with his hands and his eyes" those he loved (see "Picasso and his Children" gallery). It seems unlikely, then, that the artist would have found himself compelled by a "sublime whim" in his thoughts in recollection of a hired model or an adolescent admirer, but he might perhaps have been moved by a glance at, or thoughts about, Jacob, to whom he was "my beloved" (see "Max Jacob" gallery).

The baby was always 'his' baby, at first an asexual creature expressing its needs in all the movements and gestures that Picasso now discovered. The baby became the principal, the unique subject of his work for a time. In these pictures the father seeks his own reflection--his origins--in the child. The mother becomes a gigantic stranger, utterly subservient to the plump body of the baby, for it is the baby alone that possesses the father, who is happy to find that he now has a double (Spies 59).

Maya's description of her father's relationship with his son suggests Picasso's association of himself with childish likenesses, a tendency which becomes relevant in our consideration of the 1905-1905 canvases. In fact, the smallness of this "double," its helplessness and state of perpetual growth and change, suggests that Picasso, as he settled (albeit temporarily) into life as a husband and father, felt similarly 'small' in an equally alien world. Picasso might indeed have identified with the physical and mental transformations of a young child, as he himself struggled to sculpt his own persona into 'Picasso,' a process which often meant isolating himself emotionally from people.

Maya Picasso goes on to write that even though Picasso was delighted with being a father early on, he gradually grew distant, as he found himself drawn further into his role as artist, which pulled him away from his other roles, including that of father and husband.

In short, Paulo, his mother, the family, the visits: it just wouldn't do anymore. Of course, Picasso had his moments of liberty, almost of happiness, when alone in his studio, which was up above the family area(60).

Interestingly, Maya later describes her own relationship with her father as one which seemed to be mediated by his art. She writes that he was often emotionally distant from her, even if emotionally engaged within himself. "I was simply there," she writes, "And I was to bring something new to his interpretation of the child: I was a girl" (Spies 60). That she refers to her father as 'Picasso' throughout her introductory essay to Werner Spies's World of Children further underscores her sense (and ours) of Picasso's emotional involvement in his art and not so much in the lives of those around him in later life. Like Max Jacob, they were subjects; but unlike the Picasso who painted Max Jacob in 1905, the Picasso of Maya's youth had become 'Picasso,' the persona, the artist.

Maya (pictured right) writes of her father's art as the way through which he related to his children:

When we were at the dining table, he would suddenly say, as he very often did: 'Don't move!' He went off to get paper--a pad or an exercise book--and a pencil or colored crayons, and then came back with them. He was happy, but I was stiff, rigid (Spies 61).

It seems that Picasso's connection with his children through his depictions of them--he almost never painted other people's children, but produced enough paintings and sketches of his own to fill Spies's anthology--were in fact his way of accessing his emotions toward them and toward his art itself. Obsessed with projecting a persona of rugged machismo and artistic as well as personal virility, a forcefulness or violence that we can sense in many of Picasso's paintings, Picasso might yet have indulged in a certain 'feminine' vulnerability in depicting his children. Maya provides a touching commentary on his paintings from her own and Paulo's later childhood:

The mothers in his work of this period have all the power he could muster. They idolize Woman. Each woman in his work epitomized the femininity he had dreamed of, in full bloom and radiantly happy, but alone with her child. A goddess of fecundity. There seems to be little concern for the role of man in the act of creation. I believe my father never really thought of himself in that role even in relation to us, his children, his own flesh and blood. His 'real' children were his paintings, his drawings, his prints, his sculptures, the things he caressed with his hands and his eyes(60).

Perhaps the "femininity he had dreamed of" was not sexual after all, but represented a sort of emotional link with the world, with other people, which Picasso somehow had difficulty achieving with actual people, at least after Max Jacob. Maya's description of the painting First Steps, of her younger brother Claude, gives us a clue where Picasso the artist and Picasso the father, the lover, the man, part:

Picasso has caught everything: the glance, the position of the hands escaping the mother's authority, the foot, the soles of the feet, the toes ready to crush the soil, ready to crush the whole world. For Picasso this was the most important moment in a person's life. Alone at last! It was the conquest of the self that pointed to the future conquest of others. It was a superb picture!(69).

So I dug into a long line of World Books that dominated the solitary bookcase in our living room, imposing its will on a painted glass duck and flanked by the Bible and old yearbooks. By age ten, my vocabulary reflected an uncanny familiarity with ocean life, American presidents, and human anatomy. Context, of course, is lost to the young encyclopod. I could spit out names that sounded impressive (to me) but couldn't go much further than that. Uncles would quiz me and kids my own age would puzzle over me the way a cat puzzles over a fly. I could pass as a 'nerd,' read 'smart,' by mentioning Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale without being entirely certain that I was not referring to a cookbook.

Eventually, I think, I outgrew that stage. But then, as a potential Comp Lit major, I sometimes wonder. The other day a girl named Shauna showed up at the Middle School library where I and some other Princeton students tutor kids after school. Shauna was in sixth grade, wore glasses, a tightly-bound ponytail and responded to questions in short, slightly neurotic blurts. She was carrying a big, stuffed panda.

"So you like pandas?" I tried to be friendly as we dug into a worksheet on igneous rock.
She peered at me crossly through her glasses as though I had just asked her if she was fond of eating panda. "Well, I had to bring this one to class for a project, but if you're asking if I like stuffed animals, the answer is NO." she said. "I'm just not that kind of person."

I recoiled at her sarcasm, wondered about the home life of a child who found the notion of liking panda bears so reprehensible. Though I know that her self-conception and career plans�she intends to be an "Egyptologist" when she grows up�are childish and subject to future uncertainties, I envied the certainty with which she could say "I am just not that kind of person."

So what kind of person am I? Less certain than Shauna, it occurs to me to offer a pointillist portrait: My favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream is Cherry Garcia. My favorite color is periwinkle. Most acronyms and the people who use them make me queasy. I drink too much coffee and not enough milk. I sleep with a nightlight and grind my teeth. I was recently diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive…which explains why I brush my teeth for twenty minutes every morning. I have a golden Labrador named Misty and I think the daffodil is a perfect flower. I love airports and trail mix and rainy days. I love poetry and wish I could write it; I have friends who do. I'm told I am an exceptional whistler and a mediocre pianist (at best). I can't draw a straight line but I can't stand a crooked tie. As a child, my favorite TV shows in order of importance were: 20/20, MacGyver, and Matlock. I hated cartoons. Except for Ducktales which hardly qualified as such; I think I saw Scrooge McDuck at an alumni dinner here last summer. From fourth to ninth grade, I played football. On a team. With pads and cleats and a mouth guard….I can hardly believe it either. I broke my pinky during a rainy game. Tragically, this is the most gruesome sports-related injury I can claim. I drank two bottles of Starbucks Frappuccino everyday for two and a half years ending last summer…which, it occurs to me now, also makes more sense with the OCD. My favorite drink is a White Russian, which is also my mother's favorite drink and the wimpiest way of consuming alcohol this side of a Fuzzy Navel. I have smoked various sorts of things once. Okay, twice, but I coughed both times. And frankly, the smell of anything worth smoking makes my stomach turn (unless, of course, we're talking salmon). I do not have favorites outside of food and color, but my poem of the moment is Hardy's "Darkling Thrush;" my book of the moment is one I read this summer: Max Perkins, which was written, like this sentence, by a Princetonian, A. Scott Berg. NPR (National Public Radio) is also dear to me, especially a program called "The Splendid Table," hosted by Lynne Rossetto Kasper who talks about food the way most folks talk about sex and whose name sounds like something you'd order at one of those hairy, hempy, hydroponic, places in the Village. I paid $7.00â€�seven dollars!â€�for a cinnamon tea latte at a place in the Village a month ago. It was like drinking potpourri, which I loved. My mother too is fond of lattes of most sorts, though my father worries over anything that can sound like Sunday with an â€"e. My thought of the moment: I suppose someday when I'm old and my thoughts are beginning to get mixed up, I will remember happy moments from books and movies and other people's lives as my own. I already do this sometimes. So I figure, wouldn't it be great if everyone swapped all their happy memories so that one day, when we are all old and the caffeine, the smog, the hydrogenated oils have made us crazy, our minds will be, in larger proportion, full of happy thoughts to get mixed up with? And since we'd have spent a lifetime swapping with friends and loved ones, chances are pretty good that, at any given moment, we would be mixed up on the same happy thought at the same time as someone else. Which means we could all be, in a way, what we become less of everyday: together.

I. Picasso works

Picasso, Pablo. Boy with Pipe (1905). Private collection.
Picasso, Pablo. Max Jacob (1904). Musée Picasso, Paris.
Picasso, Pablo. Max Jacob (1905). Musée Picasso, Paris.
Picasso, Pablo. Actor and Child (1905). National Museum of Art, Osaka.
Picasso, Pablo. Acrobat with Ball(1905). The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow
Picasso, Pablo. Acrobat and Young Harlequin (1905).Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA.
Picasso, Pablo. Étude d'homme (1906). Galérie Jan Kruger, Paris.
Picasso, Pablo. Young Nude Boy (1906). State Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Picasso, Pablo. Young Nude Boy (1906). Musée Picasso, Paris.

II. Other works cited

Baker, Kenneth. "Record Price for a Picasso adds to Painting's Mystery." The San Francisco Chronicle. 11 May 2004. p. E1.

Boas. George. The Cult of Childhood. London: Univ. of London, 1966.

Cowling, Elizabeth, et al. Picasso & Greece. Andros: Umberto Allemandi & Co. 2004. No page numbers.

Fabre, Josep Palau I. Picasso: The Early Years (1881-1907). New York: Rizzoli, 1981.

Kamber,Gerald. Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso (1881-1906). New York: Random House, 1991.

Richardson, John. Telephone Interview. 2 April 2005.

Seckel, Hélène, ed. Max Jacob et Picasso. Paris : Réunion des Musées Natiounaux. 1994.

Seymour, Ann. "Picasso and his Mistresses." Fashionlines. 3 April 2005.

"Lot 7 Catalogue: Pablo Picasso: Garcon à la Pipe." Sotheby's Catalogue. 5 May 2004. no page numbers.

Spies, Werner. Picasso's World of Children. Munch: Prestel-Verlag, 1994. No page numbers.

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.

The male figure in Young Nude Boy (1906), though scarcely older than Picasso's previous adolescent models, gives an entirely new impression: of awkward strength, thoughtless expression, and manifest sexuality. Gone are the folded hands over the genitals, the intoxicated or enervated posture, the grim, philosophical stare that suggested the play of emotions�between blue and rose�which corresponded to Picasso's identity struggle. This painting is entirely roseate. The boy's form is full and his sex quite clear indeed. Importantly, the boy does not resemble Max Jacob. Rather, out of Picasso's life with Jacob has emerged a rawly virile youth without a feminine male counterpart. Picasso has left Jacob behind and with him, the artist's homosexual self. The boy's nudity suggests a physical freedom that sharply contrasts with the tight-fitting leotards and large collars of the acrobats and harlequins. But gone too is something of the personality and tragic wisdom of Picasso's earlier models. If Picasso's Boy with a Pipe was seduced, he was also vaguely seductive. Here he is replaced by a blunter presence, more physically manifest, but less emotionally so. The painting does not reflect the intimacy of the earlier works, which were produced at a time when Picasso seems to have enjoyed an intimacy with Max Jacob, one which, though ultimately rejected, he could not achieve with women. Rather, the figure in Young Nude Boy is, as Picasso would seem to so many women, "inaccessible" (Richardson 444).

One of the last paintings from 1906, another Young Nude Boy, represents the extreme of Picasso's post-Jacob masculine paintings of adolescent males. The figure is boxy and cartoonish, suggesting a diminished (or suppressed) fascination with the male body. Contrast this with the voluptuous curves of Picasso's earlier sketch of a nude Max Jacob and one becomes starkly aware not only of a lack of sexual piquancy, but also of a lack of emotional accessibility, vulnerability, or weakness. Picasso has moved far away from the lanky, feminine figures that he produced while living with Jacob and largely modeled after him. The 'boy' has become, rather clearly, a man, far more clearly masculine than any of Picasso's 1905 depictions.

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).

We see Picasso's submissive self depicted in a particularly dark light in Actor and Child (1905), which depicts a young boy in a blue leotard�the same color as the boy's smock in Boy with a Pipe�who, though discernibly male, yet retains the sexually ambiguous marks of a child; his folded hands symbolically conceal his genitalia. Yet his facial expression is almost identical to Jacob's. The actor has the boy by both shoulders, preparing to lead him somewhere; his darkened-out eyes suggest a dark intent. The boy appears reluctant. Here, Picasso provides us with what seems an at least potentially sexual and disturbing narrative, fraught with homoerotic tension. The helpless resignation of the boy, contrasted with the blind assertiveness of the older male actor, represents Picasso's competing sexual selves. Indeed, Werner Spies notes in his Picasso's World of Children, that in many of his later works, the artist depicts himself as a "blind beast" led by a woman (Spies). So, too, after his affair with Max Jacob, Picasso would spend his life 'led' by numerous women and would paint them voraciously. In Actor and Child, the blind actor plays the role of Picasso's artistically virile beast-self and the young boy, in the same facial language as the sketch of Jacob, represents Picasso's homosexual self, emotional and artistically self-imitative. One might even suggest that the sort of 'self-imitative' emotional import that characterizes Picasso's works from his time with Jacob, is here suggested by the boy's introverted posture. Clearly this blue 'self' appears already destined to be subsumed by its larger and more forceful antagonist, the actor in rose.

In fact, if we consider one of Picasso's sketches of Max Jacob done during this period, we notice that Jacob appears both provocative and childlike, embodying Boas's claim of projection of the adolescent state of one's own emotions in 'adolescent terms.' In the sketch simply titled Max Jacob, Picasso depicts what might well be the archetype of Boy with a Pipe. In the sketch, Jacob, five years Picasso's senior, is depicted as boyish and vacuous. Presumably the pipe in the sketch contains opium; Jacob has the same intoxicated stare that we find in Boy with a Pipe. Like the boy, his hair is tousled, his smock simple, his hand caught in the same enervated gesture. It is precisely this sense of enervation, of male submissiveness, which is often associated with male homosexuality and which particularly frightened Picasso.

As we have seen, from his youth, Picasso's art was linked with his sense of personal and sexual virility. A precocious artist, Richardson, writes that he was also a "precocious lover," claiming his first sexual experience to have occurred at the age of 13 (Richardson 68). His relationship with Jacob would have implied a sexual and thus artistic tenderness, bordering on weakness perhaps, that would have conflicted with Picasso's quest for personal potency as an artist and as a masculine lover. Throughout his life, Picasso worried over the "artistic sterility" that he saw in other artists, a sort of impotence of the creative sense, which leads one to self-imitation. A friend, Gerald Nordland, quotes Picasso as saying, "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility" (qtd. Seymour). Yet in his numerous paintings of nude adolescent males from this period, Picasso might doubly be 'imitating himself.' The young male bodies must have at least somewhat resembled his own (he was in his twenties at the time) and the images, if they allude to his homosexual desires and his relationship with Max Jacob, are not 'art' in a pure sense, but an outlet of personal emotion which Picasso would have recognized as self-imitative and therefore destructive.

Another Picasso sketch of Max Jacob, also simply titled Max Jacob (1905), reveals a creature so highly-feminized as to appear nearly sexless. This figure clearly harks to the ambiguously-gendered boys in Picasso's 1905 paintings. One should also note Picasso's addition of what appears to be a ruffled collar, which suggests a sort of captivity and submissiveness. This pale, androgynous figure is iconic of other of Picasso's early 1905 children, many of whom are depicted with the same submissive 'collar,' as acrobats or harlequins. Thus while the figures may represent Picasso's homosexual self, they also represent the figure principally associated with that version of himself, Max Jacob. Indeed by likening some of his earlier figures to Jacob, Picasso externalizes his homosexual identity by associating it with Jacob and then, through his paintings, supplants this figure with more virile likenesses representing a more artistically potent version of himself.

Picasso did, however, let himself be emotionally vulnerable once: in 1905 and 1906, Picasso was moving out of Max Jacob's apartment, ending a relationship that would prove uniquely intimate in what we know of his life. Though Picasso would never live with a woman for more than a decade in the course of his life, he had lived with Jacob on-and-off for three years and would correspond with him until the poet's death in 1944. Their letters, collected by Hélène Seckel in Max Jacob et Picasso, were intimate and frequent, suggesting that Picasso let himself be emotionally and psychologically vulnerable towards Jacob in a way that he would not allow himself to be vulnerable towards others. Indeed, though they lived together, Richardson writes, Picasso would have despised being thought gay. So to cover, he and Jacob created a fiction of very separate lives, in which Max worked days at the Paris-France department store while Picasso slept during the day and painted at night (Richardson 260). This was, Richardson confessed in an interview, a weak attempt at concealment: "Oh, Picasso was absolutely having sex with Max Jacob. And everyone knew!" (Richardson) Indeed even Picasso's mistress, Fernande Olivier, noted upon first meeting Jacob that the two men were "toujours ensemble" (Seckel 32). Yet Picasso could not let himself remain with Max Jacob, who represented desires which Picasso saw as effeminate and "artistically sterilizing" (qtd. Seymour). Rather, the adolescent paintings of this period tell the story of a struggle to isolate and externalize these desires.

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.