Picasso, Mère et enfant (1902)

I saw this artwork yesterday in the Degas to Dali exhibition in the Auckland Art Gallery and I have to say, this picture does the real piece no justice. I've always had a love-hate relationship with Picasso, I either love his work or find it awkward and disconnected, but this piece really touched me in some way I'm still finding hard to explain.

Standing there while looking at it in quiet murmuring room, it was like I was trespassing in this scene. A mother gently cradles her child, the blue saturating the piece in a soft yet deeply entrenched glow. I should not have been there, watching such an intimate moment, it was a scene that was so public yet so private.



Pablo Picasso, Mère et enfant [Mother and Child] (1902)
Oil on paper laid on canvas
40.50 cm x 33.00 cm

 Even though it's a scene with an air of tenderness, I can't help but feel some sort of resigned desperation in the mother. Why has she so quickly forgotten her washing in the corner to comfort her child? It feels like an acceptance of a hopeless future, the only thing left being a mothers embrace in an attempt at comfort.

Yet I wasn't sad. I didn't feel sad watching this woman. While looking at it, this hopelessness was coupled with a sort of hope. It wasn't like there was a switch or that one displaced the other, they coinsided. A resigned acceptance by the mother, but did it matter what the world held for the child if he or she had a mother that cared so deeply?

In a room filled with people chatting around me, I was enveloped in a silence so tender it almost hurt. My heart literally ached watching the duo. Such a scene of love and comfort, but so hopeless at the same time. I try and put it into words, but I never saw this painting as depressed. Perhaps lonely and quiet, but never a total depressive sadness. It was touched with endearment that came and went the longer I looked at it, fading in and out as I watched. It was the intruding in the worst way, feeling like she would turn and see me at any moment, but I couldn't manage to tear my eyes away.

Looking at it made me feel so damn human.