Motherhood (1905) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Neither the dimensions of the painting nor the private collection it belongs to are known.
Only in one of his best-known works, Motherhood of 1905, does Picasso seem to approach the subject directly. The work shows, in the foreground, a young woman nursing her child. Mother and child are wrapped and joined together in the same shawl; of the baby, only the head and a small hand resting on the mother's right breast can be seen. One senses the baby is suckling the milk with delight. The mother's head is tilted to the right, her eyes half-closed. Her hair is gathered in a chignon adorned with a flower in the same soft pink as the shawl. On the woman's middle finger a ring with an oval green stone can be seen. Her features are delicate, her hands long and slender. The figures are painted in tones of pink and grey against an indistinct blue-grey background that is neither sky, nor sea, nor wall, but functions to represent motherhood in itself. It is as if the dark evil of existence, the anguish tied to a future of misery and squalor, the deep sadness in their eyes, had been overcome and left far behind. Mother and child love each other unconditionally and form an inseparable unity: they give themselves to each other in complete fusion, to the point that the figures on the canvas appear three-dimensional, and the young woman — perhaps a circus acrobat loved by the artist? — rises to the level of the classical, universal, eternal image of motherhood.
An artistic journey spanning a lifetime
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881 and began drawing at a very young age. From the second half of the 1890s he took part in the intellectual life of Barcelona, where his family had meanwhile moved, embraced every avant-garde movement, worked feverishly, and experimented with various techniques, as if sensing his calling as an absolute innovator of contemporary art.
After a first stay in Paris in 1901, he returned repeatedly to the French capital, settling there from 1904. In these years his works, echoing sorrowful expressions of tragic human and social conditions, are marked by a stylized, incisive line and a monochrome blue tone that harshly defines volumes (the Blue Period). From 1904, acrobats, itinerant musicians, and figures from the world of the Commedia dell'Arte begin to appear in his works, touched by a tender melancholy, as blue gives way to pink-grey tones (the Rose Period).
Years of influence from African art followed, leading Picasso to break down the volumes of the human figure and to a schematic treatment of planes. Also under the influence of Cézanne, Picasso arrived at what is known as Cubism — the simultaneous, flattened representation of an image's various broken-up facets, and the overcoming of the traditional opposition between image plane and background. These early experiments, which also embraced sculpture, laid the groundwork for so-called non-objective art and anticipated abstraction.
From 1915 he returned for a time to objective representation, with clear references to the classicism of Ingres, while during the 1920s and early 1930s he often turned again to cubist decomposition and to exploring every representational form of the image, such as the oversized enlargement of subjects or Surrealist poetics. From 1929 to 1934 Picasso produced works of great expressive power, in which distortion becomes a moral representation of the anxieties and contradictions of modern man.
During the Spanish Civil War, Picasso lived his country's tragedy with deep commitment, and for a brief period served as director of the Museo del Prado in Madrid. His unsparing denunciation of the horrors of fascism and war reaches its highest pitch in the painting Guernica, an expression of the most intense outrage following the German bombing of the Basque town in April 1937. The work, whose denunciation reaches far beyond the specific event that inspired it, was presented in the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair and stirred deep emotion and acclaim. During the Second World War too, symbols of horror and disorientation often appear, such as monstrously deformed women and fragmented still lifes.
After the war, Picasso lived through a period of calm. A member of the French Communist Party from 1944, he took part in various peace congresses and created the famous dove poster for the 1949 Paris congress. From 1947 he stayed in Vallauris, on the southern coast of France, where he devoted himself mainly to ceramics, then in Cannes, and from 1961 he settled in Mougins, where he spent the rest of his life and where he died in 1973. Over his long life, also intense from an emotional point of view, Picasso had two sons and two daughters by various wives and companions.
In his later years, without abandoning the violent breaking-up of form, Picasso came to bend it toward expressing family affection and clear human feelings. With greater serenity he sought, in classical myths and in the ancient technique of ceramics, the deep sense of the Mediterranean soul. Picasso's output is extremely vast, ranging with equal success from painting to printmaking, from sculpture to ceramics. Works depicting motherhood are very numerous and reflect the artist's journey from figuration to abstraction: in many paintings from the Rose and Blue Periods, mother and child are set within group scenes, serving to represent the themes of suffering, poverty, and exploitation that Picasso was addressing at the time. Picasso does not depict motherhood for its own sake, but uses it to bear witness to an unjust society — a «social» character that prevails even when motherhood is the sole subject of the painting.