Pablo Picasso, “Three Musicians. Fontainebleau, summer 1921.” Oil on canvas, 6’7” x 7”3 ¾” (200.7 x 222.9 cm). Mrs. Simon Gugenheim Fund. ( 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).

During the summer of 1921, Picasso’s first child, Paolo, who would become a model for many of the artist’s paintings of Harlequins, was born. That summer, the artist rented a villa in the village of Fontainebleau, France; he spent all of it in his garage, working and reworking two massive six-foot-tall oil paintings titled Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians.               

Famed for its lush and vivifying landscape that was an endless fountain of inspiration for Picasso, Fontainebleau was a place of significance in the early 20th century: a section of its forest in 1861 had even become the first nature preserve in history. It was a popular destination for serious landscape artists. The naturalist painters like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau visited to paint, creating informal artist colonies in the 1820s and 1830s. In the 1860s, another generation of painters, the impressionists, came to visit: Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Auguste Renoir. 

WHAT: Picasso in Fontainebleau

WHEN: Through Feb 17, 2024

WHERE: MoMA, 11 West 53 street, NYC

Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians, a gift dedicated to the museum by Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil, depict three figures, likely representing him, his wife Olga, and their newborn son Paolo. The sharp-angled and high-contrast Three Musicians stands in direct opposition to the more classically-inspired Three Women at the Spring. Picasso is an artist who is too often and too easily classified into “periods:”  from the “rose period” to the “blue period,” his works are divided into collections based on similarity of style and color. In this exhibition, however, these two vastly different styles co-exist concurrently, avoiding the reductionist grouping of these works into a determined period. And, by extension, not allowing a viewer to define this portion of his life so easily.

The three musicians loom over, three seemingly paper-cut-out cheeky characters reinforced by their unmodulated colors. At the outset, these blocks of color of earth tones and bright blues and oranges are, at once, all-revealing, and yet, as so often happens with blocks of color, they become an impasse on the road, a blockade into which we could fall. 

The figures represent the characters of the Comedia De’la arte. On the left stands Pierrot, composed of white and cobalt blue blowing into a clarinet; in the middle stands Harlequinn, in an orange and gold diamond-pattern get-up, and on the right stands a friar, doused in a black hooded robe. They are masked like bandits or robbers, with no distinguishing features between them. In a lineup, were anything to happen, they would get off scot-free. We hear spurts of trumpet and speedy guitar picking. Here, color is freed from an object, freed from its host, and allowed to roam without a chaperone.                                                          

Pablo Picasso, “Three Women at the Spring. Fontainebleau, summer 1921.” Oil on canvas, 6’8 ¼” x 6’8 ½” (203.9 x 174 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil. (copyright 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).

The three female figures in the Three Women at the Spring emerge with chiseled bone structures resembling late Hellenic sculptures with their vacant, long-lost-at-sea eyes. We can hear the water from the spring trickling into their large hands and amphoras. Water runs — a baptism is made possible. The painting appears to be partly inspired by the three graces in Botticelli’s Primavera: everyone misses each other’s gaze, yet they are all physically in contact. While the painting is classically inspired in terms of subject matter, its proportions are decidedly Picasso. This painting also recalls the three Fates, famously fatherless three old women, who bore the responsibilities of life and death as they spanned the threads of human destiny. In Picasso’s painting, the women hold amphoras, likely in place of the fates’ spools of symbolic lifelines.

Of the three women, a single breast is exposed ready to bear milk for a child, recalling the times of the Renaissance: single breast exposed rather than a pair was often a symbol of fertility and childbearing. The soft and billowing arms of the three women are ready to receive and cradle any baby. A single hand is large enough to cradle an entire infant, creating a painting of pillowed safety: were any child to fall, he would be protected. Their bodies face each other, but their gazes wander off. Seemingly in a private exchange, a tet-a-tet that we watch from afar. Meanwhile, the figures in the Three Musicians unabashedly face us: we are invited into their world to watch the show. One painting is of a world fit for a child, and the other is likely set in a danger-ridden nightclub.           

These two worlds sit opposite each other at the MoMA. Between them, Fatherhood extends itself as a perpetual dance, a question of choosing to invite danger or fend it off.

Picasso had an incredibly tumultuous relationship with his father, and later in life, he abandoned his father’s surname and took on his mother’s: Picasso. Jose Ruiz y Blasco was an embarrassment to the artist. A bachelor until his early 40s, Picasso’s father lived off his parents, then, his more successful brother Salvador. Jose Ruiz was a rebellious man who hoped to rule but could not be restrained by society. A patron of the arts, he never made it as an artist. But in an attempt to resurrect his artistic dream, Jose Ruiz ended up doing for his child what he wished his parents had done for him and supported Picasso’s talents as best he could. 

Like his father, Picasso had his first child at 40. An easy purveyor of a good thrill, Picasso, like his father, was a man who believed that growing up and growing old was the same: he is known to have once said, “It takes a very long time to become young.” 

MoMA’s Picasso in Fontainebleau is a reflective show for the artist, who, a first-time father working in his garage, was contemplating his youth, the nightclubs he visited and had yet to visit, and still the calmer moments of life, of water trickling across hands in the spring.