Mother and son with handkerchief 1903

This is Picasso’s “Mother and son with handkerchief,” and you can tell it’s from his Blue Period just by looking at that engulfing wash of indigo. He made it with oil on canvas, and there’s something so raw and immediate about the brushwork here. The texture of this piece is everything; you can see how he’s layered the paint, almost like he’s sculpting the figures out of pigment. Notice how the blue seeps into the faces, giving them a ghostly pallor, while the dark outlines lend a kind of emotional weight, as if they’re trapped or burdened by the monochrome world around them. I'm interested in that patch of blue around the mother’s head. It's like a halo, right? It's thick and almost vibrating with energy. It makes me think of Paula Modersohn-Becker and those proto-expressionist paintings of hers. It's about feeling, not just seeing.