| Artist: | Picasso, Pablo |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Frugal Repast | |
| Date of Work: | 1904 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | The Turn of the Century | |
| Movement: | Pic: The Blue Period (1901-1904) | |
| Medium: | Etching | |
| Subject: modern alienation as a tragic condition. The mood is one of mystery and melancholy; the blues, even though this is a black and white etching. Even though coupled, the figures still seem alone, each figure in his or her own private zip code. No eyes meet. Minimal setting; frugal meal. The picture is not a specific portrait set in a particular place and time; it could be everywhere and nowhere. An allegorical picture of the human condition, which suggests mystery more than a clear cut moral. The figures are society's outcasts, marginal figures who serve as a metaphor for the modern artist no longer under the patronage of the king or the church; modernity as a condition of homelessness, rootlessness. Theme of loss, longing, and loneliness. Style: Picasso is willfully distorts his figures for added emotional expression; elongated and painfully thin, this couple seems to suffer from extreme poverty or annorexia nervosa . Picasso uses the body as a metaphor for an otherworldly, out of body, spiritual or metaphysical dimension. El Greco's elongated, spiritual figures were Picasso's source of inspiration here. Form and figure type correspond to an inner state of feeling. Highly subjective rather than objective. Context: part of Picasso's early Blue Period, colored by his first experience with a friend's death (the suicide of Casagemas). Also expresses a turn of the century anxiety and state of modern alienation. The mystery, anti-naturalism, and deliberate ambiguities of these early works suggest that the Blue Period is Picasso's version of Symbolism. Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," who starves because he cannot find the right food to fill his soul, is a particularly fitting parallel to this image. | ||
