Tanja Trojan " A Boy and Picasso´s Absinthe Drinker "
The Absinthe Drinker, from Picasso’s blue period
Interpretation „Porträt des Angel Fernández de Soto“ : Picasso porträtierte seinen spanischen Jugendfreund in seiner blauen Periode im Jahr 1903 in Paris. Das Bild von de Soto wird Picasso später als sein Hauptwerk erklären. Das Gemälde war bereits zu Picassos Lebzeiten hoch dotiert – es kostete damals, um die 29,15 Millionen Dollar – heute wird es auf vierzig bis sechzig Millionen Dollar geschätzt und wurde im Auktionshaus Christies London (Großbritannien) um 42 Millionen Dollar in Privatbesitz versteigert.
Quelle: www.tanjatrojan.com
Picasso, Pablo. 1881-1973
Absinthe Drinker
France, 1901
Picasso produced this work in the autumn of 1901, during his second trip to Paris, when he was just 22 years old. The theme of man's loneliness in a cafe, of isolation and emptiness, was not new to French art in the second half of the 19th century and could be found in the works of Degas and of Picasso's much-admired Toulouse-Lautrec. But in the paintings by the young Spaniard the theme acquired a previously unknown sense of drama. Our lonely heroine sits at a table in a cafe, the background a dirty-red wall which reinforces the sense of discomfort. Emphasizing the flatness of the canvas, the colour of the walls and the bluish tone of the marble table seem to press the space inwards, around the woman, enclosing her in her hopeless loneliness. In the pose of the absinthe brinker, in her face, we can identify the outcast: the totally enclosed space of her body, the expressive distortion of the right hand, seem to indicate the tension of a coiled spring. Picasso strictly boxed in the immobile face - the hand acts as a support, its precise perpendicular running through the imperfect oval of the figure, while a protecting hand clasps the shoulder. Everything reinforces the sense of inner tension and cuts the figure off from the world around. On the basis of real observations in a cafe Picasso created a generalised and timeless symbol of the tragedy of life. On the back of the painting, concealed beneath heavy overpainting in blue and yellow, is a woman's head, probably a fragment of a work which did not satisfy the artist.
Author:
Picasso, Pablo. 1881-1973
Title:
Absinthe Drinker
Place:
France
Date:
1901
Material:
canvas
Technique:
oil
Dimensions:
73x54 cm
Acquisition date:
Entered the Hermitage in 1948; handed over from the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; originally in the Sergei Shchukin collection
Quelle; THE STATE HERMINATE MUSEUM
