The Blue Period
Pablo Picasso meets the troubled writer, poet, and painter Carles Casagemas in Barcelona in 1899, in Els Gats, the watering hole and gathering place for artists and intellectuals. Their friendship blossoms as the men frequent bars and whorehouses in Catalan, then travel to Paris where they share a studio in Montmartre. But while Picasso grows in skill and stature as a painter, Casagemas withdraws, numbing himself with laudanum and morphine, soon alienating his friend as he fluctuates between drug-induced stupor, argumentative insecurity, and suspicion about Picasso’s relationship with model and Casagemas’ lover Germaine Gargallo.
The Blue Period takes the reader from the alleys and soot-covered buildings of Barcelona to the four-story beige-brick #49 on Rue Gabrielle and the studio that housed Picasso, Casagemas, Gargallo and other women, adding architectural and atmospheric detail along the way. The novel recounts the first display of a Picasso painting in the Spanish pavilion at the world’s fair and the beginning of his now renowned series of austere and doleful monochromatic blue paintings.
The problem with fictionalizing the life of a well-known historical figure is the license the author must take to balance fact and imagination. When a life has been well-documented, an author has grounding on which to build a sense of who a person was and what underlay the specific actions he or she took. But little has been recorded about Casagemas and the possible reasons for his suicide and, hence, author Kummer’s basis for characterization. Yet motivation that drives action is the substance that feeds understanding. As a result, The Blue Period captures time, place, and events so a reader can relate to the where and when, but it lacks the emotion so a reader can ponder the why.
