La Vie (painting)
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| Artist | Pablo Picasso |
| Year | 1903 |
| Medium | Oil-on-canvas |
La Vie (Zervos I 179) is a 1903 oil painting by Pablo Picasso. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Picasso's Blue Period.
La Vie was painted in Barcelona in May 1903. It measured 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide and portrayed two pairs of people, a naked couple confronting a mother bearing a child in her arms. In the background of the room, apparently a studio, there are two paintings within the painting, the upper one showing a crouching and embracing nude couple, the lower one showing a lonesome crouching nude person very similar to Sorrow by Vincent Van Gogh. With this Picasso repainted another motif, a birdsman who attacks a reclining naked woman, traces of which are visible to the naked eye. Preparatory studies are: Private collection, Zervos XXII 44; Paris, Musée Picasso, MPP 473; Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB 101.507; Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB 101.508.
It was painted at a time when Picasso was having no financial success. In contrast, the new painting sold only a month after it was finished, to a French art dealer, Jean Saint Gaudens. The sale was reported in the Barcelona newspaper, Liberal. With La Vie Picasso repainted the canvas of The derniers Moments from 1899, a painting that he had presented at the Paris International Exhibition 1900.
The painting was given by the Hanna fund to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio in 1945 and is in their permanent collection.
The interpretation of the enigmatic composition has been the subject of much discussion. The male figure clearly shows the portrait of Picasso's friend, the painter Carlos Casagemas, who had committed suicide not a long time before Picasso created La Vie. X-ray photographs show that Picasso first executed a self-portrait that he later replaced by the portrait of his friend. This fact and the circumstance that the confrontation of the two groups happens within a studio makes it verisimilar that self-reflective questions of the young artist are addressed in La Vie. The crucial point indeed, scholars agree, seems to be the enigmatic gesture in the center of the composition.
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