Why Motherhood Kept Resurfacing in Picasso's Paintings

Feature image: Pablo Picasso, La Soupe, 1902-03, © Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2017) via Art Gallery of Ontario.

Pablo Picasso's recurring depictions of mothers and children in his work sit uneasily against the record and reputation of how he treated the women in his own life. Françoise Gilot's 1964 memoir, Life with Picasso, documented physical and psychological abuse during their decade together. Dora Maar suffered a breakdown after the relationship ended. Marie-Thérèse Walter, who began her relationship with Picasso in 1927 at seventeen while he was forty-five, took her own life in 1977. Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, took her own life in 1986. Gilot remains the only one of his major partners to leave him rather than the reverse, and Picasso responded to her memoir by cutting off contact with her and their two children and, by multiple accounts, working to limit her standing with galleries and dealers for years afterward. 

That record runs alongside a separate, strictly formal history worth tracing on its own terms, the specific technical choices Picasso built into this recurring subject across four distinct periods of his career. Picasso produced motherhood imagery in heavy concentration across the early 1900s, the early 1920s, the war years of the 1940s, and the Vallauris years beginning in 1947, and each stretch carried the technical vocabulary of the period he was working in at the time.

Picasso's close friend Carles Casagemas took his own life in February 1901, following the collapse of a relationship Picasso had watched unfold at close range; the two men had shared a studio in Paris and traveled together in Spain in the months before Casagemas's death. That loss landed on a twenty-year-old painter who was largely unknown at the time, living in genuine poverty, splitting his time between Barcelona and Paris and struggling to sell his work. That same year, Picasso began regular visits to the Saint-Lazare women's prison-hospital in Paris, an institution well known enough in the city to turn up in cabaret songs performed in Montmartre, where sex workers suffering from venereal disease were held alongside the small children many were permitted to keep with them.

The two experiences compounded each other directly, and Picasso returned to the subject repeatedly over the next three years rather than in any single defining canvas, producing paintings, drawings, and pastels of mothers and children throughout what art historians now call the Blue Period, running roughly from late 1901 through 1904. Casagemas's death gave Picasso a private grief, and Saint-Lazare gave him a public, institutional version of the same subject, women bound to children inside a system built around punishment, and motherhood became the single theme wide enough to absorb both across dozens of works. 

The technical language Picasso built to hold it developed alongside the grief itself, a narrow, near-monochromatic palette dominated by cold blues, elongated limbs and hands drawn from his close study of El Greco during a January 1901 trip to Toledo, and flattened pictorial space stripped of incidental detail, a set of choices that pushed emotional weight into contour and gesture rather than into setting or narrative detail. The elongation in particular carried over from the social realist draftsmanship of Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec, artists whose Montmartre subject matter Picasso had been absorbing since his first stay in Paris the previous year.

Two decades passed before the subject built up with the same intensity, under an entirely different set of circumstances. In 1917 Picasso traveled to Rome to design sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, an assignment that put him in close, sustained contact with ancient and Renaissance sculpture and pushed his work toward the monumental, simplified figures now associated with his Neoclassical period, the stretch of the early 1920s when Picasso worked in deliberate dialogue with antiquity rather than with the fractured planes of Cubism he had spent the previous decade developing alongside Georges Braque. The following year he married the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, settling into a considerably more conventional life than the one he had kept through his twenties, a fashionable apartment, household staff, the visible markers of an artist who had arrived. Their son Paulo was born in February 1921.

Fatherhood gave Picasso direct, lived access to a bond he had previously observed only in other people, and that access arrived in the same narrow window as the Neoclassical turn already underway since the Rome trip four years earlier. Picasso produced at least a dozen paintings on the mother and child theme between 1921 and 1923 alone, with drawings and studies extending well beyond that count, and the technique across them shows the same shift running through his broader Neoclassical output at the time, heavy, rounded volumes standing in for the earlier period's flattened elongation, simplified drapery drawn from Roman statuary and from Ingres's odalisques, and a warmer, earth-toned palette replacing the near-monochrome blue. The line itself grew heavier and more assured, built for weight rather than for the nervous, attenuated contour of the Blue Period, a technical register meant to communicate permanence and physical solidity.

By the early 1940s, the context surrounding the subject had turned considerably darker. Picasso remained in Paris through the German occupation, which began in June 1940, and continued working under material shortages and the ongoing threat of Gestapo surveillance. His relationship with the photographer Dora Maar ran through most of this period, and the work Picasso produced alongside her during the occupation years, 1940 to 1944, carries heavy, restricted color, skulls in still lifes, confined interiors, a technical vocabulary built directly from the Cubism Picasso had pioneered three decades earlier, now pushed toward something rougher and more expressionist under wartime conditions rather than the analytical fracturing of his 1910s work with Braque.

Picasso met the painter Françoise Gilot in occupied Paris in 1943, while Dora Maar remained his primary partner. The relationship that developed between Picasso and Gilot eventually moved him south to Vallauris, where he also took up ceramics for the first time. Their son Claude was born in 1947 and their daughter Paloma in 1949. Picasso turned seventy in 1951, roughly forty years older than Gilot, and the household they built together took a shape distinct from the more formal domestic arrangement he had kept with Olga Khokhlova three decades earlier.

Picasso was living inside an actual family day to day from 1947 onward, and the resulting body of work, drawings, paintings, and prints of Françoise, Claude, and Paloma together, grew directly out of that ongoing domestic life rather than out of any single defining moment. Art historians generally treat this stretch, roughly 1947 through the mid-1950s, as Picasso's ceramic period, defined by the pottery he was producing simultaneously at the Madoura studio, work that favored flat, saturated color fields and loose, confident line. 

Fractured, angular planes replaced continuous contour, and a brighter, more varied palette made up of purples, greens, and saturated blues, which took over from the restricted color of the previous decade, a shorthand built for speed and repetition given how often Picasso was now returning to the same domestic subjects day to day. Gilot left him in 1953, closing out the household that had produced this final, prolific stretch of work on the subject.

The dichotomy sits plainly across the record. Picasso spent sixty years returning to the pairing of a woman and a child, working through grief in 1901, fatherhood in 1921, wartime hope in 1943, and an actual household by 1947, while the women who made that body of work possible, as models, as partners, as the mothers of his own children, absorbed documented abuse, professional retaliation, and in two cases ended their own lives. The tenderness in the paintings and the record of how Picasso treated the women in front of him do not reconcile. Both are part of the same career.

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