The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Hel Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
At the time of The Old Guitarist's creation, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Symbolism had greatly influced Picasso's style. Furthermore, El Greco, Picasso's poor standard of living, and the suicide of a dear frid influced Picasso's style at the time which came to be known as his Blue Period.
At the time, having rounced his classical and traditional education and searching for fame, Picasso and his frid Carlos Casagemas moved to Paris. A year later, Casagemas became hopelessly miserable from a failed love affair and committed suicide. Picasso was greatly afflicted by this evt and was soon depressed and desolate. In addition, Picasso was very poor. His poverty made him idtify and relate to beggars, prostitutes and other downtrodd outcasts in society.
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These evts and circumstances were the impetus for the beginning of Picasso's Blue Period which lasted from 1901 to 1904. The Blue Period is idtified by the flat expanses of blues, greys and blacks, melancholy figures lost in contemplation, and a deep and significant tragedy. After the Blue Period came Picasso's Rose Period, and evtually the Cubism movemt which Picasso co-founded.
Elemts in The Old Guitarist were carefully chos to gerate a reaction from the spectator. For example, the monochromatic color scheme creates flat, two-dimsional forms that dissociate the guitarist from time and place. In addition, the overall muted blue palette creates a geral tone of melancholy and acctuates the tragic and sorrowful theme. The sole use of oil on panel causes a darker and more theatrical mood. Oil tds to bld the colors together without diminishing brightness, creating an ev more cohesive dramatic composition.
Furthermore, the guitarist, although muscular, shows little sign of life and appears to be close to death, implying little comfort in the world and acctuating the misery of his situation. Details are eliminated and scale is manipulated to create elongated and elegant proportions while intsifying the silt contemplation of the guitarist and a sse of spirituality. The large, brown guitar is the only significant shift in color found in the painting;
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Its dull brown, promint against the blue background, becomes the cter and focus. The guitar comes to represt the guitarist's world and only hope for survival. This blind and poor subject depds on his guitar and the small income he can earn from his music for survival. Some art historians believe this painting expresses the solitary life of an artist and the natural struggles that come with the career. Therefore, music, or art, becomes a burd and an aliating force that isolates artists from the world.
And yet, despite the isolation, the guitarist (artist) depds on the rest of society for survival. All of these emotions reflect Picasso's predicamt at the time and his criticism of the state of society. The Old Guitarist becomes an allegory of human existce.
Paul Mariani, a biographer of Wallace Stevs, prested his analysis of the painting as a counterpoint to objections raised by Stevs concerning the origin of his 1937 poem titled The Man With the Blue Guitar stating,
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Despite his repeatedly dying it, Stevs does seem to have a particular painting in mind here: Picasso's 1903 The Old Guitarist, which portrays an old man with white hair and beard sitting distorted and cross-legged as he plays his guitar. If Picasso attempted to portray the world of poverty and abject misery, it was because that had be his own plight as a struggling young artist in Barcelona, where he painted many pictures including this one, of the poor. The painting is almost tirely done in monochromatic blues and blue-blacks, except for the guitar itself, which is painted in a slightly warmer brown. The man is blind but, no longer seeing the world around him, he sees more deeply into the reality within.[4]
In The Old Guitarist, Picasso may have drawn upon George Frederic Watts's 1886 painting of Hope, which similarly depicts a hunched, helpless musician with a distorted angular form and predominantly blue tone.
Rect x-rays and examinations by curators found three figures peering behind the old guitarist's body. The three figures are an old woman with her head bt forward, a young mother with a small child kneeling by her side, and an animal on the right side of the canvas. Despite unclear imagery in crucial areas of the canvas, experts determined that at least two differt paintings are found beath The Old Guitarist.
The Blind Guitar Player
In 1998, researchers used an infrared camera to petrate the uppermost layer of paint (the composition of The Old Guitarist) and clearly saw the second-most composition. By using this camera, researchers were able to discover a young mother seated in the cter of the composition, reaching out with her left arm to her kneeling child at her right, and a calf or sheep on the mother's left side. Clearly defined, the young woman has long, flowing dark hair and a thoughtful expression.
The Art Institute of Chicago shared its infrared images with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where curator William Robinson idtified a sketch by Picasso st to his frid Max Jacob in a letter. It revealed the same composition of mother and child, but it had a cow licking the head of a small calf. In a letter to Jacob, Picasso reveals he was painting this composition a few months before he began The Old Guitarist. Despite these discoveries, the reason Picasso did not complete the composition with a mother and child, and how the older woman fitted into the history of the canvas, remain unknown.
In 2019, researchers at University College London used neural network to recreate the painting found by infrared camera. The neural network was trained to recreate the painting from other works of Picasso during his Blue Period.
José Feliciano On 50 Years Of
As one of Picasso's more notable Blue Period works, The Old Guitarist has influced other artists of all backgrounds. For example, Paul McCartney drew from the painting wh creating a chord progression. This progression and McCartney's accompanying melody were his contributions to the 2015 Kanye West song All Day.ACOUSTIC WEEK: I'm not like other guitar players, Jose Feliciano says, stating the kind of truism that is likely to elicit a no kidding response from even the most casual music fan. But it's one the venerated fingerstyle legend is happy to expound on.
In fact, I'm not even like most acoustic players because I use the nylon-string acoustic, he says. I do play steel-string and the electric guitar, too, because I love rock 'n' roll and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. But my bread and butter has always been the nylon-string. Very few guitarists play nylon-string. They don't know how to get the sound out of them. That's something I've spent a lot of time on.
Feliciano's sound - a masterful, singular style that mixes Latin-tinged rock, folk, jazz and blues with splashes of classical - has transfixed audiences since the mid-'60s, when the guitarist, blind since birth, burst on the pop charts with his wildly inventive spin on The Doors' Light My Fire. Through the years, Feliciano, 67, has racked up multiple Grammy wins, released dozens of hit albums and even scored a standard with his Christmas single Feliz Navidad, which has been been covered by everyone from Celine Dion to the Voodoo Glow Skulls.
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The guitarist figures that his quest to plumb the mysteries of the nylon-string acoustic guitar is a never-ending one. It still makes sounds and does things that surprise me, Feliciano says. Any time I think I've learned all the tricks, I'll come up with something, or somebody else will, and a new door opens. It's beautiful.
I listened to a lot of Spanish guitarists. There was Yomo Toro, who was such a great player. He played the requinto. I started out on the instrument when I was about nine, but I don't think I was a guitarist till I was 14. I played the requinto, too, like Yomo Toro.
When I was 15, I became an avid fan of Andres Segovia. He brought so much respectability to the guitar. I remember when I tried to apply to the High School Of Music & Art in New York, they wouldn't take me because I played the guitar. I had to play the piano - that's what they said. In my situation, because I was very poor and we lived in a small apartment, I couldn't have a piano. So music and art were out. Julliard was out, too, because you needed money to go there.
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Everything I learned was from records and listening to other people. Segovia was my classical influence, and then I liked Charlie Byrd a lot, too. In the 1960s, when Charlie brought bossa nova to the United
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