Collection Highlights

This masterpiece is among the largest and most complex paintings from Picasso's Blue Period, dating from 1901 to 1904. Painted in Barcelona, La Vie remains one of the key works in the prodigious output of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and pottery of this dominant visual artist of the twentieth century.

La Vie is set in an artist's studio, containing vague suggestions of cloistered architecture. A nude woman clings to the male figure, dressed only in a white loincloth, who points toward the heavily draped woman holding a sleeping baby. Between these groups are two canvases, stacked one on top of the other, in the beginning stages of development and only outlined. In the upper one, two clinging nudes look out hopelessly; in the other, the figure rests its head on drawn-up knees. Picasso made four preparatory sketches for this painting, changing the figures in the composition at least twice. The cloaked female figure was initially a bearded male. The male figure, which began as a self-portrait, ended as a portrait of Picasso's late friend Carlos Casagemas, who had committed suicide after being cruelly rejected by a lover.

The painting is clearly allegorical, as well as unusually complex and obscure for Picasso's early work. Scholars have not reached a consensus concerning the narrative, which has frequently been discussed in print but never explained by the artist. Picasso's painting projects a pessimistic outlook, expressed not only in the symbolism of the figures but also in its desolate, cold, blue tones. During his Blue Period, he often dealt with themes of misery and human destitution, and here his subject may allude to the responsibilities of everyday life, the incompatibility of sexual love, and the difficulties of artistic creativity.

The canvas's surface has numerous pentimenti. From X-ray photographs taken in 1976 at The Cleveland Museum of Art and through subsequent research, some of mysteries of the piece have been explained. In addition to the changes Picasso made while painting La Vie, a second painting was discovered beneath its surface that appears to be the lost work, The Last Moments (or The Moribund). Elements identified in the radiographs--a nude female reclining on a bed, a bedside table with an open drawer supporting a lighted lamp, a priest, and a winged creature with a human body and the head of a bird--resemble the description of a large canvas that was the key painting in Picasso's first exhibition in Barcelona and at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.