CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/26/2019

Gorgeous 'Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods' celebrates the artist's earliest masterpieces

"Self-Portrait" (1901) is reproduced from Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, the exceptional new exhibition catalogue from Hatje Cantz and Fondation Beyeler. One of the first works to explore the full potential of the blue monochrome, the painting presents the artist "as a member of bohemian society, pale-faced and hollow-cheeked, deliberately made to seem older than his years, and enveloped in a thick overcoat that turns his body into an indistinct mass," Stéphanie Molins writes. "Photographs of the painter at the age of twenty bear witness to a completely different physiognomy… The color blue, expressing deep melancholy and physical suffering as well as moral anguish, affects every aspect of the composition, articulated in areas of blue-green and midnight blue. The hypnotic gaze and the psychological intensity of the depiction recall some of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraits, while the red beard, drawn in meticulous detail, is often seen as a tribute to the Dutch master." Picasso kept this painting throughout his life, and included it in a 1932 retrospective at the top of a family polyptych, flanked by his son Paulo and his wife Olga, indicating its importance.