Three Self-Portraits, Three Picassos

This is a self-portrait Picasso painted in 1901, and the whole canvas is blue. His Blue Period is generally dated from 1901 to 1904, and blue dominates the work of those years, which is why this self-portrait has such a bluish cast.

Now let's line up three of his self-portraits. It's hard to believe they came from the same hand, especially the first and the last.

The first was painted when Picasso was 18, before he ever came to Paris. The influence of art school was still strong, and the portrait is exquisitely detailed, with carefully drawn eyes, nose and mouth and well-handled shadow and shading. It is flawless. He painted it according to the standards of academic art, the established style he absorbed from his father, an art teacher, and from his classes. He met the standards the school set, and then gradually broke out of that mold.

The second is a self-portrait from around age 25, painted in Paris. The line running from ear to jaw looks almost like a mask. Compared with the portrait at 18, it is flat, with no shadow and with simplified, straight lines. He had begun tearing down the artistic conventions he'd learned. Perspective, shading, contrast and vanishing points are all gone. The mask-like look is no accident: Picasso drew some of his inspiration at the time from African art and masks. An African mask is simple, with round eyes and a raised nose, yet it makes a powerful impression. That is why Picasso's paintings from this period can feel like masks.

The last was painted when Picasso was 90. You can make out roughly the eyes and the shape of the face, but would anyone look at it and say, "That looks like Picasso"? You see simplified geometric shapes, such as round eyes, a nose and triangles. It could pass for a child's drawing rather than a master's. Where does the hair begin and end? Keep asking such questions and you arrive at one: does it even matter? Must a painting resemble its subject? At the root of this way of thinking is Cubism, which Picasso pioneered as a young man, a revolutionary movement the art world had never seen. Its premise is that painting things objectively, as they appear, is no longer meaningful, and it begins by boldly stripping away concrete detail. We'll look at Cubism more closely later.