Pablo Picasso (1881-1973); Self-Portrait (Yo – Picasso), 1901; Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 60.5 cm; Private collection
The Courtauld Gallery is renowned for its compact, highly focused exhibitions, and “Becoming Picasso” is a very successful instance, consisting of work painted in just one year of Picasso’s life: 1901, the year when he had his first major exhibition in Paris, aged only nineteen.
The first half of the Courtauld exhibition consists of the exuberant, brightly colored work that Picasso rapidly created in the spring of that year. It is said that he sometimes finished three canvasses in a day for the show in June and July organized in the gallery of the leading Paris art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. The latter part of the Courtauld exhibition consists of the very different, melancholy work he produced later in 1901, when he was depressed at the suicide in Paris of his close friend from Barcelona, the Catalan aesthete Carlos Casagemas. It was the beginning of Picasso’s Blue Period when this dominant preferred color reflected his disenchanted mood.
The contrast can well be seen in his two self-portraits from earlier and later in the year, both on display at the Courtauld. In the Vollard show, he was Yo Picasso—I Picasso—a pushy, confident, self-declamatory egoist, come bursting forth to capture and captivate Paris. His orange cravat, a shirt of brilliant whiteness, the vivid blur of the palette in his hand and the streaked dark background between them