Pablo Picasso, 'Motherhood (La Maternité)', 1901

When this painting was sold in the 1950s, Pablo Picasso stated that he had made it in 1901. This was a significant year in his early career. He had returned to Paris after briefly working in his home country of Spain. He had begun to develop a style that would set him on course to become one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

Motherhood shows Picasso’s path to this new style. The flat planes and vibrant colours of the landscape were influenced by Post-Impressionist artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Picasso saw pictures by Gauguin collected by his friend Paco Durrio, as well as in the studio of his art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Throughout his career, Picasso’s works were often in dialogue and competition with those of the old masters. In early 1901 he encountered works by El Greco in Toledo. This influence can be seen here in the mother’s elongated limbs and hands.

In early 1901 his close Catalan friend Carles Casagemas died by suicide. This threw Picasso into profound grief from which he struggled to escape. It triggered a time when his themes evoked death and illness, and his palette became mainly blue. Hence, this is known as his Blue Period.

He started to visit the Saint-Lazare women’s prison to draw the inmates. Many were sex workers and their children. Picasso frequently depicted women as either harlots or madonnas. It did not take long for him to start to idealise these women as Mannerist Madonnas. The model here, however, may be Germaine Florentin, Casagemas’s partner. During this period, Picasso briefly had a red-haired girlfriend named Blanche who may also have influenced this figure.

Picasso’s work often took inspiration from women. In 1901 he completely dropped his father’s name and only used that of his mother, Maria Picasso. He returned regularly to themes of maternity and motherhood, contrasting the life-giving nature of motherhood with a darker palette and bleaker topics of suffering. In this picture, although the expression of the mother is sombre or wistful, the bright colours of the background lighten the mood. Blue features in the woman’s dress and in the figures’ skin tones, but has not yet come to dominate the entire work as it would do subsequently. Picasso’s unique blend of biographical elements and the absorption of a wide range of cultural elements has resulted in a painting that is deeply human, capturing universal themes of love and protection. Yet, it is suffused with a deep melancholy. Soon his works would lose all traces of bright colours and the figures would no longer display the tranquillity and repose seen here.