MoMA with Jeff: Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1915.

Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamps were a trinity of talent and theory, the triumvirate that propelled the direction of the 'plastic arts,' arts that flowed easily from painting to ceramics to sculpture to stagecraft, during the bulk of the 20th Century. But it was Picasso who had the personality to prod his contemporaries like no other, infuriate them into response, and cultivate their own styles simply to challenge his own it seems at times. He was seductive, manipulative, tireless, prodigious, and possessed of a talent that allowed him to glide effortlessly from style to style, many of which he helmed, to incomparable effect.

For someone who enjoyed his ability to steer the lives of others, someone who might be described as 'impresario,' someone who understood the theatricality and drama of his life force and artistic achievement, I think it no accident Picasso culled a 16th Century commedia dell'arte image for himself and rendered it dozens of times in painting after painting as a fitting self-image, particularly in the period between 1901 and 1905, that of The Harlequin. That he would revisit the subject in 1915 was a message in a bottle to all of us who wish inside his head.

To begin with, there is something so graphically pleasing about Harlequin, so iconically recognizable in the diamond motif of his costume, that it had to be appealing to the man for whom three of his periods have been named Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, and Crystal. But for someone with Picasso's emotional breadth, his courage to enter dark places, and his ability to convey great love and joy, Harlequin is emotionally iconic as well, painted, for example and just as often, by Picasso's predecessor of some two hundred years, Watteau.

Harlequin is the meddler, cheeky, agile, skillful, yes, manipulative, attractive, street smart, wily. But he is an outsider, stuck in a lower social circle, pulling the strings from below. Despite how high he could fly by the seat of his pants and with the wiles between his ears, he always risks scorched wings, he always settles back to his station. Pull back the cheerful mask from this often-masked character, I suspect a tear would reflect off a stage lamp more often than not. How Picasso, the swarthy Spaniard living among the stratified Parisians, must have identified, how well he must have thought he could render these thoughts abstractly, straight to the heart, in the two dimensions favored by Cézanne and his protégées, how directly he must have hoped he could tell us his secrets with the utmost authenticity but maintaining the plausible deniability one might need to bar the vultures, the beasts, the obtuse from a tender heart.

For today, I spring ten years forward from the height of Picasso's identification with Harlequin and offer up MoMAs 1915 painting.

Here, the Harlequin is ambiguous. Where we see diamonds from expectation are sometimes, actually, polygrams, loosely knit together, bleeding into one another on a form that barely resembles the human, block-like as it is. Faceless, but in front of an easel, I think it is clearly the artist. But if anything breaks the flatness of dimension, it is that which the artist holds out to us, a white canvas with the outline of a silouhette. The nose and slope of the forehead are clues it is indeed Picasso, but from the side and featureless it is, anything but a self-portrait in a conventional sense. Surrounding the entire field is a sea of black. 

It is important to note that during the execution of this painting, Picasso spent hours everyday visiting the hospital where his mistress, Eva Gouel, lay sick and dying. He wrote as much to Gertrude Stein (the company these people kept, astounding) on December 9th, 1915, the day he completed the work. Five days later, Eva was dead.

This painting is thoroughly modern, in its palette, in its abstraction, in its dimensionality, but more so in its content. Picasso had exhausted Cubism and lost his lover. Grief-stricken and wandering emotionally and artistically, he gives us this study in anxiety, floating in a vacuum. What courage it must have taken to lay into this canvas with anything like doubt for this mountain of a personality: I am no longer who I was, the clown is dead, but where am I? 

And how often is every step of every day in our lives riddled with that question if we are brave enough to ask it? How often is life derailed in an unforeseen instant by loss, by love? And how often do we present an unfinished portrait of who we are to our loved ones with this humble plaintive plea, please to tell me whom you see? Who am I? Please. Where do I go?