Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Spanish, 1881-1973 (active France)
The Frugal Repast (Le Repas Frugal), 1904
etching on zinc plate 1904; printed on steel faced plate 1913
18 1/4 x 14 3/4 in.
SBMA, Gift of Wright S. Ludington
1941.2.28
Portrait of Picasso from the Blue Period
RESEARCH PAPER
Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz in Malaga, Spain in 1881. He later adopted his mother’s more distinguished maiden name – Picasso - as his own. Though Spanish by birth, in 1901, at age 19, he was dividing his time between Barcelona and Paris and in 1904, at age 23, Picasso settled in France, where he lived most of his life.
The Blue Period
In Barcelona, Picasso’s Blue period began. From 1901 to 1904 his work underwent a radical change in color and subject matter. Until then, his work was characterized by the sharp division of brushstroke and the exuberant color. He painted in oil, applying a big, loose, individualized brushstroke and contrasting colors, which gave his work the texture of a mosaic. Captivated by scenes on the street and by the nightlife, his work was full of passers-by, of lovers embracing on the boulevards, and of elegant men and women. Scenes of Parisian life were abundant.
Almost overnight, a deep and significant change took place in his painting. This transformation is more than a mere change in color, more than the adoption of a new tonality. It was, above all, the result of a new attitude toward people. He began brooding over the human condition. Instead of painting calm scenes, he began to represent enigmatic, emaciated figures, sitting rigid and silent against a vague or empty background.
A series of social and personal factors were a determining factor in this change. At that time, the artist was under the influence of the philosophic doctrines from the north of Europe. He was introduced to French symbolist literature. He believed that art sprang from sadness and pain; it had a dramatic mission and was a source of emotion rather than pleasure. He had never experienced abject poverty and his failure to interest dealers in his work and make decent sales was discouraging. “No amount of recognition, no amount of gold, would ever heal the wounds” Picasso suffered during these hellishly humiliating months. This deprivation would entitle him to take an even blacker view of life than earlier.
Also, in 1901 Picasso’s friend Carles Casagimas shot himself because of a broken romance. This tragic death affected Picasso greatly and he fell into a depression. He became isolated, despondent and increasingly critical of society’s treatment of the urban poor. As if to purge his melancholy, Norman Mailer suggests in Picasso: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man “he adopted a palette of almost exclusively blue hues. Picasso‘s universe became dominated by one color: blue, a color having psychological implications, and which impregnates all his canvases, and is introduced into some drawings. He dressed in blue and painted in blue and by the light of a candle, he indulged his rage and despair”.
During this time, he painted the homeless, beggars, prostitutes, malnourished mothers and their children, cripples and other outcast. He became obsessed with blindness. His figures are characteristically angular and emaciated in appearance. The figures seemed weighed down by their own misfortune, with apathetic expressions often surrounded by large empty spaces.
Although Picasso underscored the squalor of his figures during this period, neither their clothing nor their environment conveys a specific time or place. The subjects are transformed into almost mythical figures that belong to no particular or familiar epoch. This spiritual atmosphere is suggested not only by the angular lines of the emaciated bodies, but above all by the sad, subdued, distressing color blue which dominated the pictorial space and the figures. This lack of specificity suggests that Picasso intended to make a general statement about human alienation rather than a particular statement about the lower class in Paris.
In August 2004, Picasso settled permanently in Paris. He was living in Montmartre, in a dilapidated studio christened “Bateau Lavoir” in the center of bohemian life. It was at this time that Fernande Olivier, Picasso's first long-term lover (she would be his model and mistress for the next seven years), began living with him. Olivier described in her journal, “Picasso was working on an etching; it was of an emaciated man and women seated at a table in a wine shop, conveying an intense feeling of misery with terrifying realism”. This etching was Le Repas Frugal.
Though most art enthusiasts think of Picasso primarily as a painter, he was also a master printmaker. In his biography Picasso: Life and Art, French art critic Pierre Daix expressed amazement that Picasso’s “first true [], a trial run, turned out a masterpiece.” Le Repas Frugal, is considered one of his very best prints, a testament to a genius who could master a new medium so readily and so completely as to emerge at its pinnacle by the time he had completed a single work.
The Technique of Etching
Etching starts with covering a metal plate with a waxy coating, usually varnish, called a ground. The artist scratches on the ground with a needle or scraper, exposing the metal beneath. The plate is then immersed in acid, which "bites" into the exposed lines and eats away those parts of the plate that are no longer protected by the varnished ground. The plate is inked and printed in exactly the same way as an engraving. It is easier to draw quickly on the waxy ground than it is directly onto the plate and this is why etching became the preferred technique for Picasso who wanted to match the fluidity of drawing with the aesthetic possibilities of printing.
Le Repas Frugal (The Frugal Repast)
Le Repas Frugal is a scene of hardship and alienation that stands as one of Picasso’s best-known images of Picasso’s Blue Period. It reveals an emaciated, almost skeletal, couple sitting at a table, sharing a paltry meal of bread and wine; the man and woman are embracing, but their heads are turned away from each other. They gaze vacantly in different directions. In the etching, faces, limbs, upper bodies, arms, breasts and especially the hands and fingers are all stylized, distorted and elongated to express the soulfulness of the couple’s melancholy poverty. El Greco used a similar kind of distortion and elongation in the 16th century to make his painted saints look more ascetic and soulful.
Amy Schilpp in “Art Critique Le Repas Frugal, 1904” notes that Picasso used different shades and lighting to give depth and detail to the two figures. His choice of lighting reflects the mood that the couple is feeling. Darkness surrounding the man reflects his ignorance about the woman's boredom and lack of emotion. The lightness drawn around the women insinuates that she is aware of the loneliness between them. The shadowy quality contributes to the overall effect.
Although the figures are united in a tender embrace, their heads are turned in different directions and distant gazes reveal an emotional separation that contrasts with their physical closeness. It is difficult to be sure whether the man is blind or not. He stares outward with half-closed, empty eyes, entirely withdrawn into himself, into the darkness. Even the empty bowl in the foreground echoes the cavities of the man’s eye sockets, and his face is turned away as if refusing the pretense of eye-to-eye contact. The woman’s gaze is lost in the distance. The blank stare that is drawn on her face is the unfortunate fate that has become her unchangeable life. This mutual solitude is underlined by the noncommittal, cramped position of the woman’s hands. She has pendulous breasts, but her proudly raised shoulders reject any hint of self pity. Their meal of bread and wine can have a symbolic meaning. Le Repas Frugal is an expression of physical and spiritual hunger.
Le Repas Frugal portrays the mutual loneliness of two people, even though they share everyday life, no matter how attached they may be to one another. There is no one who has not experienced this feeling of being far more lonely with the person with whom they are supposed to be close, than when they are alone. Picasso’s couple embodies a universal sense of loneliness and quiet isolation that transcends time and place.
Whoever gave the print the title it now bears was accurate, especially when one realizes that it does not refer to the lack of food on the table. We can assume that the bread and wine are there as the perfect symbols of what can and should be shared. The “frugality” is elsewhere. Between them, nothing is shared.
Thirty impressions (some signed or numbered or dedicated) were printed at the time of creation by Delatre on Arches laid paper. We know that the plate was worked by Picasso in Delatre’s studio in September 1904; a proof dedicated to Sebastian Junyent is dated by the artist “Paris, septiembre 1904”. The zinc plate had already been used by Picasso’s teacher, Ricardo Canals, to depict a landscape done by Joan Gonzalez. Picasso scraped the plate clean before starting work, but left traces of the landscape (a stream, reeds and pebbles) which are still visible on the right side of the proof. Le Repas Frugal was exhibited at the Serrurier Gallery in February 1905. It did not appear to have provoked any special interest or attention. Only one signed 1904 strike, printed from zinc plate during the time of creation– in blue-green ink tone (one of two)- is on display (National Gallery of Art).
In 1913 Ambroise Vollard, an art dealer, bought Le Repas Frugal along with fourteen circus etchings and drypoints. He steel-faced (electroplated with a thin layer of steel) so they could stand being printed in large numbers. The large edition was printed by Ford. The consequence was that much of the more subtle work was obscured or radically reduced. Between the 1st state and the 2nd, there are no corrections. Picasso only worked on the lighting, adding hatching to the background and some redefinition to the man’s arm. Vollard’s edition of 250 impressions (not signed, not numbered) on Van Gelder wove paper (SBMA print) and 29 on old Japan paper allowed the series to be sold inexpensively. The published edition was known Suites des Saltimbanques.
The Frugal Repast is perhaps the quintessential and final Blue period icon. It has spoken to viewers in its profoundly melancholy way, even after 100 years. It will continue to compel us as long as compassion dwells in human hearts.
Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council by Pamela J. Greben 2006
Endnotes
1 Taylor Staples, “An iconic Picasso at gallery” - The Washington Times Dec 4, 2004.
URL: http://washingtontimes.com/arts/20041203-082523-3725r.htm
2 Hans L.C. Jaffe, “Picasso”
URL: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/picasso_blue.html
3 “Picasso” National Gallery of Canada
URL: http:// www.national.gallery.ca/english/default_1976.htm
4. Norman Mailer, Picasso: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995)
5 Taylor Staples 2
6 Taylor Staples 2
7 Dallas Museum of Art, Picasso the Printmaker:Graphics from the Marina Picasso Collection, (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1983) 10.
8 Amy Schilpp, “Art Critique Le Repas Frugal, 1904”
URL: http://tiger.towson.edu/users/aschil2/critique.html
9 Kirk Varnedoe; Pepe Karmel, Picasso: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art ( New York, NY for exhibition shown at National Gallery of Canada) 1997
10 Dallas Museum of Art 33.
11 Dallas Museum of Art 32
12 Taylor Staples 3
Bibliography: Le Repas Frugal
Dallas Museum of Art, Picasso the Printmaker:Graphics from the Marina Picasso Collection. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1983
Jaffe, Hans L.C. “Picasso”.
URL: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/picasso_blue.html
Norman Mailer, Picasso: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man .Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1995
On-Line Picasso Project -Professor Dr. Enrique Mallen, Director, On-line Picasso Project, Texas A&M University, 8434 Turtle Rock Loop, College Station, TX 77845 Phone (979) 696-9921, Fax (979) 774-9301
E-mail: [email protected]
URL: http://csdll.cs.tamu.edu:8080/picasso/
Paleta; The Art Project “Artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Spain”.
URL: http://www.paletaworld.org
Penrose, Roland. Picasso His Life and Work. New York: Schocken Books, 1962
“Pablo Picasso [1881-1973] - Featured Artist” Christie’s London 2002.
URL: http://www.artfact.com/features/artistLot.cfm?iid=txupP9FM
Staples,Taylor. “An iconic Picasso at gallery” The Washington Times Dec 4, 2004.
URL: http://washingtontimes.com/arts/20041203-082523-3725r.htm
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
The Frugal Repast, 1904-1913, is the first print that Picasso completed. In 1904, just arrived in Paris, he acquired the zinc plate, cleaned off a landscape, and reused it for a first edition of 30 impressions, still haunted by faint traces of the previous landscape. His dealer Ambroise Vollard acquired the plate, had it resurfaced in steel, and in 1913 published a second edition of 250 impressions, including the one featured in SBMA’s collection. The emaciation of both figures, their melancholy, and the man’s blindness reflect Picasso’s paintings of his Blue and Pink periods. One critic has described it as “gaunt and cheerless…the downside of human suffering”; another sees “poetic charm and repose” in it. It surely evokes the loneliness of Picasso’s first months in Paris.
- Picasso on Paper, 2008
[Note: the press release also specifies that the work is a dry point.]