The Old Guitarist – Pablo Picasso Painting & Facts

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The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso created late 1903 – early 1904. It depicts an old, blind, haggard man with threadbare clothing weakly hunched over his guitar, playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is currently on display in the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.

Via [MentalFloss]

Click on image to enlarge!

Interesting Facts

• It’s bigger than you’d expect.

Old Guitarist is presented on a small canvas, but it actually measures in at 48 3/8 x 32 1/2 inches, roughly four by 2 2/3 feet.

• It appears that the man pictured is blind.

Observe his closed eyes, averted from the world and the instrument he plays. It’s suggested that a key influence of The Old Guitarist was Symbolist literature, which often employed blind characters to suggest a vision beyond this world.

• There’s a woman hiding on the canvas.

If you look closely at the space above the guitar player’s ear, through the blue-gray paint you might make out a forehead and eyes. This ghostly woman invited further study, so the museum that owns the painting, The Art Institute of Chicago, studied it in a conservation lab using infrared scans and X-rays to see what Picasso had painted over. What was discovered was an abandoned portrait of a nude young woman, seated and nursing a child from her right breast, as well as a calf and cow.

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Detail showing an image beneath

• Picasso related to his penniless guitar player.

At 22, Picasso was overcome with a sadness that he projected on this piece, and many others from his Blue Period. He showed this through the monochromatic, flat representation. Picasso knew what it was like to be broke, spending most of 1902 in poverty.

• The Old Guitarist is the most iconic work of Picasso’s Blue Period.

This chapter in the seminal painter’s career began with Casagemas in His Coffin, which depicted his dearly departed friend in his final repose. From there came many more, solemn portraits of despair, desperation and desolation that have scattered to museum walls all over the world. But none has come close to surpassing the popularity of The Old Guitarist.