 Hello, I'm Nancy Eisen and I'm the Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. I hope that you're safe and well wherever you're joining us from today and that you're in the mood for seeing a wonderful painting by Picasso. It's in Room 18 of the Barnes Foundation which is one of the upper galleries and it's on the north wall which is what we're looking at right now. If I tell you that the painting we're going to look at is blue, I suspect you've gathered which one it is. It's the Picasso that is to the right of the doorway and if you look at the ensemble, the grouping of paintings that we see on this particular wall, you'll see that it balances out another vertical canvas to the left which is by Cezanne. So we're here we have a really wonderful dialogue between those two upright works but let's look more closely at the painting itself. Now as you can see that blue absolutely dominates this piece. As I mentioned it's by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and it was made in 1903 when Picasso was still in his 20s but this picture shows an older man. He sits alone at a table before him there's an empty plate in his own in his own right hand there's a bread roll there's a terracotta jug on the table but none of this actually seems to interest the figure. If we look at his face he seems distracted. If we look more closely still we see that the corners of his mouth are downturned. His brow if you like is slightly furrowed and really this can't be called a meal. The title of the work is the aesthetic. Essentially we're getting the idea of somebody who's emaciated perhaps even too weak to eat who has his mind on other things. Now the moment that Picasso made this picture was one where he had returned to Spain. He'd been in Paris prior to 1903 and in January of 1903 he returns to stay with his parents. Now this is a difficult time for him at first interestingly when he got back to his parents' house he chastised his mother for cleaning his shoes he said that he missed the dust of Paris so that really gives you a sense of that longing to be somewhere else and yet he settled in and had some very productive months. If you have time after watching this video I'd encourage you to look at the Cleveland Museum of Art website to look at a painting called Life or Lavie which you also made in 1903 but this painting comes from the summer and it's one of a few that he makes that look at sensors. Now why would Picasso be looking at the sensors? Really this is relating to traditions in Spanish painting. Artists like Ribeiro, artists of the 17th century really were interested in how you could use painting to evoke other sensors so how can you see something with your eyes that also makes you think of what you could hear, what you could taste, what you could smell and interestingly what we have is Picasso taking that idea and really turning it on its head and if this picture makes us think of taste it does so because of the absence of taste and if you look here I mean that hand is so well painted you know it's almost drawn you see that sort of slightly muffled line which is just paint on blank canvas or rather the priming of the canvas that white priming so it says the ground layer has really given you the coloration but to return to my idea of this being a meal that isn't a meal that that red roll almost looks like a stone there's nothing appetizing about it at all and the plate is very clearly empty there's no sense of it ever having been used for a meal on this occasion. So what we have is Picasso taking on the traditions of his country and making them his own. He also does this in another way and Picasso's biographer the late John Richardson talked about how well versed Picasso was in religious imagery and he talks about a Pieta an image of the Virgin Mary and the dying Christ that's in the cathedral in Malaga and that was a painting that Picasso would have known and the way in which Picasso paints the face of this secular subject because I think even you know even though you get religious aesthetics this person is most likely a secular figure a figure from regular life but Picasso paints him as if he were somehow Christ like you have these sunken cheeks a real sense of suffering and again this is very like some of the the sorts of handling that you see in Spanish paintings so Picasso very aware of the weight of that tradition and also interested I think in how he can make it his own. Now it's really funny to think that a picture that's this melancholy and blue and cool and it's arguably the the most blue of the blue pictures that Picasso makes because he paints a lot in this colour around this time one might think it was a wintery picture but actually it was made in the heat of a Mediterranean summer Picasso spends almost all of 1903 in Spain so we get the sense here that he's working from memory he is if you like pulling on past experiences things he's seen and amalgamating them into a picture for his own purposes and I think that's quite poignant for us at the moment because in the pandemic we've all been missing things we've been recalling things we're pulling those things together in our own ways and so I think that it's really wonderful to see Picasso doing this so well and so interestingly and so without with that I will I will leave you with that thought but I hope that as I say you you stay safe that you come and visit us at the Barnes and whenever that might be I really hope that you have a chance to look closely at this picture and to enjoy Picasso's genius firsthand thanks so much I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation I hope you enjoyed Barnes takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation