The Old Guitarist
Pablo Picasso
1903
Chicago Art Institute, Chicago
Because Picasso frequently returned to Céret, the artist must have been inspired by this fusion of restraint and freedom when he came to create his Cubist paintings of guitars and guitarists. Specifically, if we look at the The Old Guitarist (1903), completed prior to Picasso’s Céret visits and his Cubist years, we see that Picasso had not yet been influenced by the sardana’s form. Categorized in Picasso’s Blue Period, the painting’s pervasive blue color immediately sets a somber tone for its subject, a blind beggar on a Barcelona street corner (Penrose 93). The man is dejected, with torn rags as clothes, and the guitar becomes an object natural for a street entertainer to possess. The musical instrument shares in and adds to the beggar’s loneliness, as well as becoming the means of outflow for the beggar’s emotions. Author of Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage, Simon Shaw-Miller, in his analysis of this painting, wrote that the painting points out “the solitary bohemian existence of the artist and the struggle for an artistic life, in contrast to the joys of shared experience of community� (Shaw-Miller 98). Rather than serving as an instrument to bring people together, Picasso portrayed music as a separating force and a burden. Here, Picasso’s music is a symbol of rejection and a loss of relationship with others. The The Old Guitarist attributed music as a power that allowed one to draw within oneself, closing off others. The music in this guitar painting serves as a complement to the subject of the painting, contributing to the downcast tone.