The Blue Period of Picasso is the period between 1900 and 1904.
"This period's starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year. In choosing austere color and sometimes doleful subject matter - prostitutes, beggars and drunks are frequent subjects - Picasso was influenced by a journey through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, who took his life at the LHippodrome Cafe in Paris, France by shooting himself in the right temple on February 17, 1901. Although Picasso himself later recalled, "I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas's death", art historian Helene Seckel has written: "While we might be right to retain this psychologizing justification, we ought not lose sight of the chronology of events: Picasso was not there when Casagemas committed suicide in Paris ... it was only in the fall that this dramatic event emerged in his painting, with several portraits of the deceased". (https://www.pablopicasso.org/blueperiod.jsp#:~:text=The%20Blue%20Period%20of%20Picasso,occasionally%20warmed%20by%20other%20colors.)
"What if someone had asked
Picasso not to be sad?
Never known who he was
Or the man he'd become
There would be no blue period"
"A painting, for me, speaks by itself, what good does it do, after all, to impart explanations? A painter has only one language, as for the rest ..."
They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.
' The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
Wallace Stevens
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