it starts growing around midday
when the green tentacles
and sharp leaves
thicken my belly.
later it begins
to stem upwards,
it matures and fills
every artery and
easily
splits it like a pea pod,
spilling the drops of beads.
it entangles the liver, the spleen,
follows my spine,
each vertebrae,
brutal, silent, unseen.
finally, by the evening my eyes twinkle
turning indigo,
the two periwinkles.
Even though I adore the despicable emotional and physical brokenness captured by “Guernica,” I still prefer the play between grace and heaviness, gentleness and roughness of the Blue and Pink periods. Anyways, that has nothing to do with what we are about to discuss. I wanted to share a few personal thoughts/associations on these two Picasso pieces that are hanging side by side in the Met, probably not by accident.
Pablo Picasso. Girl Asleep at a Table. 1936. Oil on canvas.
Pablo Picasso. The Dreamer. 1932. Oil on canvas.
Painted only four years apart, “Girl Asleep at the Table” and “The Dreamer” at first strike as dramatically different. The first work is a grayscale image of a girl caught asleep sitting at the table in the sharp electric light from the overhead lamp; the light causes every object in the small room to cast dramatic shadows. (The same technique of image fragmentation and sharp light contrasts found further exploration in “Guernica;” Picasso even uses the same lamp as the centerpiece of his monument to the Basque tragedy of 1937). “The Dreamer” is a colorful painting of the body of a nude woman against the clear blue sky; she is sweetly asleep on the grass in the midday sun, with the dreams that materialize around her in the form of whimsical flowers coiling behind her soft and fresh voluptuous figure. After the second look one starts noticing the similarities in both paintings: the rearrangements in the body part and the separation of the canvas into smaller closed areas by the outlining, which are typical for Picasso.
I walked through the Met purposefully not focusing on anything and wondering if anything will attract my attention. The two sleeping girls intrigued me, so I sat on the bench in front of and thought for a while, looking for my own imagery that would allow me to understand these two works my way. Both girls seemed to be sleeping peacefully, but for the different reasons. The girl in the room seemed to be asleep because of being tired, where the dreamer was probably enjoying yet another of the many frivolous afternoons. The girl asleep on the table made me think of the long evenings that I spent over physics and math homework in high school. I would be so tired after the swim practices that I would often fall asleep over some problem, and my grandma would have to come and wake me up; the wake ups were always abrupt. Sleeping in the field, my personal favorite, would be a complete different story: falling asleep somewhere in the fragrant greenery always meant a deep undisturbed nap. These two memories were my key to understanding Picasso’s choice of grayscale versus color and of sharp shapes versus the rounded ones in both cases. Grayscale captures the tiredness of the sleeper and her indifference to the surroundings because of this tiredness, thus Picasso gives us the colorless world. The color of “The Dreamer,” on the other hand, portrays the ease and pleasure of sleeping in the midday in a field, which translates into the vividness of the dreams. The sharpness of electric light snatches only some parts of the room out of the darkness, and Picasso captures the nature of such light with sharper forms; the generosity of the midday sun mildly reveals the shapes beneath, thus, Picasso gives us the softness of the Dreamer.
I was glad to find the two sleepers; where paintings would normally enforce tsunamis of emotions onto me, these two just made me think.
