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Two sisters

Pablo Picasso • Painting, 1902, 152×100 cm
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About the artwork
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Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Genre scene
Style of art: Post-Impressionism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Wood
Date of creation: 1902
Size: 152×100 cm
Artwork in selections: 35 selections

Description of the artwork «Two sisters»

"Two sisters" (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) were written shortly after Picasso returned to Barcelona. In a letter dated July 13, 1902 to Max Jacob, the artist described an unfinished picture depicting a “whore and a nun in Saint-Lazare” (the name of the prison in which there was a “special infirmary” for treating sexually transmitted diseases in women detained by police in brothels; nuns served there also as security guards).

After reading a letter from Picasso, you can imagine a scene in the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec, but in fact the picture depicts two women, one of whom transfers the other child - an unwanted fruit of an accidental relationship. The artist makes a faint gesture towards realism, depicting a “whore” (left) in a white shawl - the obligatory headdress of prostitutes with syphilis. The work itself looks like an altar and is done on the panel, and not on the canvas - like a medieval painting.

“Two Sisters” is a vivid example of how Picasso combined everyday reality with Christian iconography. The pose and gestures of women resemble how artists depict the Visitation of Mary, the blue color symbolizes the Virgin. This scene is related to her meeting with Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist.

The painting was created in the "blue period" of Picasso (1900 - 1904), when the artist painted essentially monochrome paintings in blue and blue-green shades, occasionally diluting them with other colors. These gloomy works are now among the most popular among the Spaniard, although at one time he sold them with difficulty. His early years in Paris were difficult, and these canvases depicting beggars, cripples, street children and the blind seemed to reflect the author’s own poverty and his insecurity about tomorrow.

It is not clear what exactly became the starting point for this period. Perhaps Picasso was affected by a trip to Spain and the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, who shot himself in a Paris cafe on February 17, 1901. The artist himself claimed that he began to write in blue when he learned about the death of a colleague. But art critic Helena Secel notes that he was not in Paris during the suicide. This dramatic event was manifested in the works of Picasso only in the autumn of that year, when he made several portraits of the deceased.

Since the end of 1901, Picasso painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in a gloomy allegorical picture"A life" (1903, Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts). And “Two Sisters” are among the works revealing the shadow world of prostitutes and brothels, together with the image"Celestine" (1903, Picasso Museum in Paris), which presents the landlady of the brothel Carlot Valdivia. Belmo in her eye refers us to another theme of the “blue period” - blindness (see engraving “A meager meal”, paintings"Breakfast of the blind" and "Old Jew with a boy") In addition, the artist then also often portrayed naked women and mothers with children.

The “blue period” was followed by “pink”, when Picasso's paintings were mostly dominated by this warm color, but the artist’s depression did not stop. It actually continued until the “Cubist period” (which followed the “pink”), and only in the subsequent period of neoclassicism did his work begin to demonstrate playfulness, which remained an outstanding feature of his work until the end of his life. Contemporaries of Picasso did not even make a distinction between the blue and pink periods, considering them one.

The constant theme of Picasso’s “blue period”, which turned into “pink,” was the hopelessness of social outsiders - prisoners, beggars, circus artists, the poor or other desperate. This topic corresponded not only to his mood, but also to the spirit of the time, the artistic and intellectual vanguard of the early 20th century.

Author: Vlad Maslov

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