Janna King

April 2007

Art and Modernity

Mother and Child as Hope in Picasso’s First Steps

Pablo Picasso’s 1943 painting, Mother and Child (First Steps), uses symbolism, color, and a modification of Cubism to convey a message of hope during Nazi occupation of Paris. The painting is unusual in that Picasso did not usually paint children in the Cubist style. Picasso tended to paint children in the style of classicism or draw traditional, mimetic portraits. It is not until later in his work that he experimented with painting children in a more playful child-like fashion, only to revert back to symbolism later in his life. Paintings of his own children also differ from other children, the latter of which are more symbolic, as in First Steps.

First Steps (fig. 1) shows the scene of a young boy learning to walk with the help of his mother. The figures were modeled after his maid Inez and her son. It is done in the style of Cubism, but not Analytical Cubism; it is “more ‘relaxed’ than those [paintings] of High Cubism -- the figures and objects more accessible, that is, more conventionally recognizable” (Kuspit). The lines are sharp, angled, and the geometric shapes are boxy. The distortions of the boy’s body show his awkwardness in trying to walk on his own. The brushstrokes are visible and fairly thick. His mother looms large behind her son, practically filling the canvas, but the boy looks massive as well, taking up much of the space. He is placed dead center to show that this is his moment. The dark grays, greens, and blues give the painting a somber feeling. The mother’s eyes seem loving, yet sad. She might be worried that her son may fall. However, the child’s eyes are so large that they seemed filled with hope. He is confident, in the moment, and excited to take his first steps on his own.

The painting was made during World War II when Germany was occupying Picasso’s home of Paris. It was displayed prominently after the city’s liberation at the Salon de la Libération in 1944. Unlike many artists at the time, Picasso did not flee France, and decided to stay during Nazi occupation. As a result, many of his paintings at the time have a grim color palette of sobriety. Although the first steps of a child are a happy occasion, it takes on more meaning in this context: “In both the sad eyes of the mother and the jagged tense lines of the child's straining body Picasso is expressing the heavy burden and terrible toll that the war had taken on the people of France” (Elmore). A sense of hope is conveyed through the young child’s first steps of independence.

In Picasso’s war era paintings, “the influence of the wars, while rarely overt, lurks just below the surface” (Ragheb). While First Steps appears to be, and in simple terms is, just a painting of a momentous occasion for a mother and her child, it means more when placed in the situation of its time. Many of Picasso’s paintings during the wars have the presence of sadness and “the subject of the woman provides a vehicle for meditation on the emotional tumult of the period” (Ragheb). During the Spanish War, Picasso painted many portraits of his lover Dora Maar as a symbol of the pain that the war caused, as in Weeping Woman (1937). Similarly, the mother in First Steps shows sadness and worry in her eyes, but it is her son whose eyes are filled with life and hope.

In his personal life, it appears that Picasso was not especially fond of children. In his book, Elgar claims Picasso “did not show any tenderness towards children, as we see in The Little Boy with the Lobster (1941) or First Steps” (198). However, portraits of Picasso’s own children such as Portrait of the Artist’s Son, Paul (1923), Paul, the Artist’s Son, Aged Two, on a Donkey (1923), The Artist’s Son, Aged Three, in Harlequin’s Costume (1924), and Portrait of Maya, Aged 8 (1943) (fig. 2) are drawn in a much softer, sentimental way than Picasso’s usual style and are not at all Cubist. Paintings of Paulo are formal, “as if they were those of a prince due to inherit his father's crown” (Lawton). According to his daughter Maya Picasso, “In these pictures the father seeks his own reflection—his origins—in the child. The mother becomes a gigantic stranger, utterly subservient to the plump body of the baby, for it is the baby alone that possesses the father, who is happy to find that he now has a double” (Spies 59). Certainly the mother in First Steps, as a large mass in the background, is subservient to her young son.

Perhaps the reason that Picasso’s portraits of his own children are painted more tenderly than paintings of other people’s children is that they are a reflection of himself. In Maya’s view, Picasso was only interested in the depictions of his children, not bothering to really connect with them outside of his art. In painting children that are not his own, Picasso is freer to use children as symbols. In his wartime paintings, “it is the complexity of space and intricacy of line that makes these pictures convincing, and keeps them from sentimentality” (Kuspit).

An inspiration for First Steps might have been a lithograph by Jean Charlot from 1936 also titled First Steps (fig. 3). Besides having the same name and subject, the compositions of each work are quite similar. In both, the mother takes up most of the space and seems to be a large mountainous figure in the background. However, the child in Charlot’s lithograph is proportionately smaller than Picasso’s child in comparison to the mothers. Charlot’s figures are also very round, while Picasso’s are more square and angular.

Picasso certainly added his own characteristics, like changing the garments from Mexican to Spanish clothing, “the right foot of Picasso’s child corresponds to the mother’s bared foot in Charlot’s print. The zigzag line of the mother’s dress at the left edge of Picasso’s painting corresponds to that of the mother’s robe in the print. The pug nose, eyebrow lines, and upper right cheek line of Picasso’s child resemble Charlot’s” (Charlot 277), as well as other similar details. (Confusingly, the author of the article is named John Charlot.) As seen in sketches for the painting, Picasso started off with the child in a robe like in Charlot’s print, as well as having the child smaller in relation to his mother at first. Eventually he decided to increase the size of the child and “as a result of this increase, the mother is deemphasized almost to the point of becoming a backdrop” (Charlot 277). The main difference in these works is that while Charlot was working with mass and space, Picasso was working with linear and kinetic compositions.

Around the time that Picasso was making this painting, American regionalism painting was popular in the United States. Abstract expressionism was also starting to become popular, with artists like Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, and Rothko. These two styles were opposing. The American Scene artists rejected the modern art of the Armory Show in favor of realism depicting the American landscape. The abstract expressionists were becoming more abstract again like in the beginning of the twentieth century. They are seen as combining the emotional intensity of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. The artists were likely influenced by Picasso’s Cubist and expressionist art.

In 1939-40, there had been a retrospective of Picasso’s work, including his masterpiece Guernica, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which had been hugely successful. The exhibition greatly increased the museum’s popularity and prestige. New York City, as well, began to replace Paris as the art capital of the world. Many emerging artists came to see the exhibit, such as Jackson Pollock and Louise Bourgeois, and “fell into tortured, self-conscious artist mode. Bourgeois stopped painting for a month. Pollock bought a book on Picasso and later threw it against a wall in a fit of rage, screaming, ‘That guy thought of everything!’” (Farr).

Between the first and second world wars, Picasso’s style turned to classicism. Most of his paintings of mother and children were done during this time. Inspired by ancient art he saw while in Rome, Picasso began painting heavy-set figures in a neoclassical style. He may have done this as a reaction to his disillusionment and shock from the horrors of the war. Many other European painters also returned to a more traditional art form, back to the basics. In these classicist paintings, “the bodies are fleshy and sensuous, but the faces are surprisingly cool” (Lawton). First Steps is unusual of Picasso’s mother and child paintings in that it is done in a Cubist fashion during World War II. Most all of Picasso’s other mother and child painting were done in 1921 or 1922, such as Maternity, Mother and Child, and Mother and Child on the Seashore (fig. 4). This is most likely the result of the fact that his first child, Paulo, was born in 1921.

One possible reason why Picasso did not usually paint children in his Cubist periods is the question of “how do you identify a child in a Cubist painting?” (Lawton). The figure is so fragmented that it is hard to tell whether it is an adult or not. Picasso is finally able to succeed in First Steps because of the relationship between the mother and child. The mother is so much larger that it is obvious that the boy is a young child. Children also disappear from Picasso’s work in the late 1920’s, when his art becomes more surreal. It possible that “the confrontation with his own first child, Paulo, born in 1921, made him feel some inhibitions about subjecting the figure of the child to the extreme distortion of his works of that period” (Lawton). These portraits are painted in a style similar to that of the Renaissance artists Raphael and da Vinci, and according to Daix, “the Infant Jesus himself was never made so much by painters” (Daix 122). Picasso sticks with painting formal portraits of Paulo until after his son turns four, when the paintings disappear altogether.

Picasso starts painting portraits of children once again with the birth of his second child, daughter Maya. Although many of drawings of her are formal as well (as seen in Portrait of Maya from 1943), he experiments with painting her in a playful, imaginative way, especially in Maya and Her Doll (1938) (fig. 5). The painting uses many bright colors and with no regard for proportions, similar to how a child actually paints, but with a good dose of the fragmenting of Cubism. Picasso is no longer as afraid to distort the child’s figure.

By the time his next children are born, Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949, Picasso has more efficiently mastered painting his children in his own unique way. In Claude in Polish Costume (1948), Claude and Paloma (1950), and Paloma (1950), the paintings are more about expressing a mood through the colors and shapes than about portraying the subject in a mimetic way. Picasso is even able to completely get rid of sentimentality and actually make Paloma look rather frightening and ugly in Paloma with Celluloid Fish (1950) (fig. 6). There are no paintings of any of his children past puberty, probably because he did not want to face their growing sexuality, and “they disappeared from his life when they or their mothers crossed him. After he broke with them, the children were never allowed to see him again” (Lawton). Interestingly, one of Picasso’s first drawings in 1885 is of mischievous cherubs, as is one of his last, Painter and Child from 1969. This suggests that Picasso was never truly able to connect with his children and think of them as individuals, resorting at the end to symbolism once again.

First Steps is a significant work in Picasso’s career because it is quite different from his other works of mothers and children. It is a Cubist work and uses subtle symbolism to express Picasso’s emotions living in Paris during the Nazi occupation. In portraits of his own children, especially with Paulo and Maya, there is often a tenderness absent from paintings of other children. By the time he has his last two children, Picasso is more able to separate them from sentimentality and express his ideas and feelings with the use of bright colors and fragmented Cubism.

First Steps signifies Picasso’s hope and dreams for the future of Europe and the world at the end of the war troubles. It symbolizes the first steps of freedom from Nazi oppression. Picasso went on to live another thirty years and was incredibly prolific, continuing to create fresh and exciting new works, stepping out into a new world filled with promise and hope, away from the past and into the future. Maybe First Steps does signify Picasso: his playfulness, boldness, daringness in art, and even his child-like self-absorption. It has excitement, experimentation, and innovation, which is Picasso at his best.

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Fig. 5 Fig. 6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charlot, John. “The Source of Picasso's "First Steps:" Jean Charlot's "First Steps"” Zeitschrift FüR Kunstgeschichte 55.2 (1992): 275-278.

Daix, Pierre. Picasso. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965.

Elgar, Frank. Picasso. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956.

Elmore, Christine A. "Look Before You Think: How to Appreciate a Painting." Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/2001/2/01.02.03.x.html>.

Farr, Kristen. "Picasso and American Art." KQED Public Broadcasting. 26 Mar. 2007. NPR and PBS. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://www.kqed.org/arts/visualarts/index.jsp?id=14748>.

Huffington, Arianna. "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer." The Atlantic Monthly June 1988. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198806/picasso>.

Kuspit, Donald. "Death and Picasso." ArtNet. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit6-30-99.asp>.

Lawton, Michael. "When Picasso Painted Children." International Herald Tribune 14 Oct. 1995. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://www.iht.com/articles/1995/10/14/pic.t.php>.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000.

Masters, Brett. "Picasso and His Children." Impressionism & the Making of Modern Art. Princeton University. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/bmasters/archives/001939.html>.

"Modern and Contemporary Art." Yale University Art Gallery. Yale University. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/collection/permanent/pc_modern.html>.

Spies, Werner. Picasso's World of Children. New York: Prestel, 1996.

Ragheb, J. Fiona. "Picasso and the War Years (1937-1945)." Guggenheim Museum. Guggenheim Museum. 22 Apr. 2007 <http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/picasso/lg/ns/index.html>.