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Audio Stop 11

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A group of three men, two children, and one woman gather in an empty, dusky rose-pink landscape under a blue, cloudy sky in this nearly square painting. Most of the people have muted, peachy skin, and the woman and the youngest boy have cream-white skin. The woman sits on the ground to our right, apart from the rest of the men and children. She wears a coral-red skirt, a beige shawl, and straw hat, and she looks into the distance to our right. The others stand in a loose semi-circle on the left half of the composition. A man wearing a multicolored, diamond-patterned costume stands with his back to us to the left. He looks to our right in profile and holds the hand of a little girl who also stands with her back to us. She wears a pink dress and white stockings, and her right hand rests on the tall handle of a white basket. A portly man wearing a scarlet-red jester’s costume and pointed hat stands opposite this pair, facing us to our right. Next to him to our right a young man wears a tan-colored leotard with a black bottom. He holds a barrel over his right shoulder and looks over to our right. The sixth person is the youngest boy, who wears a baggy blue and red outfit, and he looks toward the woman. The eyes of all the figures are deeply shadowed.

Pablo Picasso

Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

East Building, Mezzanine — Gallery 217-C

Family of Saltimbanques is the most important painting Pablo Picasso made during his early career. For him, these wandering saltimbanques (acrobats, dancers, and jesters) stood for the melancholy of the neglected underclass of artists, a kind of extended family with whom he identified. Like them, the Spanish-born Picasso was impoverished during the first years he spent in Paris striving for recognition. The brooding Harlequin—in the diamond-printed costume, at far left—bears the face of the dark, intense young artist himself.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:

From late 1904 to early 1906, Pablo Picasso painted a recurring theme: the saltimbanque, an itinerant circus juggler or acrobat. Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art, notes that Picasso identified so closely with the subject that he put himself in this picture.

HARRY COOPER:

That is a self-portrait on the left, the tall young man standing there. A lot of avant-garde artists identified with groups like this, who were marginal members of society, wandering on the outskirts, the hinterlands, of Paris that were being developed as Paris was expanding, so the landscape itself reflects their placelessness.

NARRATOR:

The title suggests the group of performers is a family. But they seem strikingly disconnected.

HARRY COOPER:

The eyes are heavily shadowed. They may be looking one way or another. Nobody is very expressive at all. But I think what carries the narrative is the gestures that are barely linkages of body to body. The hands and the feet are almost more important than traditional ways of telling a story.

NARRATOR:

Picasso reworked his canvas several times, adding figures and altering the composition. His painting style varies greatly throughout the picture.

HARRY COOPER:

The background, especially the sky, is the most expressive, most abstract part of the painting. It’s thinly painted, at least in the final layer. There are other passages where the paint is very thick, where it’s clearly been reworked. There’s no coherent, unified manner in the painting, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting and radical.

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