Born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso displayed a penchant for disguise and love of parody at an early age. He became attracted to the theatre while a child, producing a backstage drawing of Teatro Principal in Coruña, where he saw El Alcalde de Zalamea by Calderón and romantic melodramas by the popular dramatist José Echegaray. While a teenager, he created a buffoon-like version of himself in Self-portrait in a Wig, in which he masquerades as a Spanish nobleman. His lifelong passion for the circus was perhaps sparked by his adolescent affair with Rosita del Oro, a star equestrienne at the Tivoli-Circo Ecuestre in Barcelona. In all likelihood, he regularly witnessed the antics of Cristoforo and Pulcinella (Spanish derivatives of Harlequin) during Spain’s annual street carnivals. And, as some would argue, Picasso was psychologically predisposed to clowns, to their rebellious, contradictory nature: Despite his formal art training at La Lonja in Barcelona (where his father was a teacher) and the academy of San Fernando in Madrid, he defiantly joined ranks with a bohemian group of modernistes who met regularly at Els Quatre Gats café in Barcelona. They were a disorderly lot – devoted to political anarchy and social causes, particularly the plight of the urban poor. Their taste for Symbolism and Expressionism flew in the face of Spain’s art establishment.

Pablo Picasso, Pierrot (1918), oil on canvas,
92.7 x 73 cm. The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Sam A. Lewisohn Bequest

From 1901 to 1904, Picasso began dividing his time between Barcelona and Paris, struggling to survive while he expanded his art practice, and selling the odd work. He became isolated, despondent, and increasingly critical of society’s treatment of the urban poor. As if to purge his melancholy, or to “keep cosmic forces at bay,” as novelist Norman Mailer suggests in Picasso: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, he adopted a palette of almost exclusively blue hues (hence, the famous Blue Period). Dressed in blue, and painting in blue by the light of a candle, Picasso indulged his rage and despair, creating La Vie and The Frugal Repast to immortalize Paris’s dispossessed: prostitutes, beggars, malnourished mothers and their children, impoverished couples. The harlequin emerged as part of this cast of suffering characters, a decidedly uncomic figure: thin and fragile in appearance, with elongated limbs and a forlorn expression of gentle resignation. In Harlequin, Picasso’s subject has stepped from the circus tent and is seated alone at a café table, still in costume and makeup, conceivably listening to a conversation of which he is not a part. Sadly out of place – like the émigré artist who created him.

In 1904, Picasso settled permanently in Paris, living in a dilapidated residence known as the Bateau Lavoir (because of its resemblance to a laundry barge) at the very centre of bohemian life. Although he was still impoverished, his spirits had greatly improved. The monochromatic blue tones gave way to varying hues of pink, ushering in the “Rose” period. Picasso now had a beautiful live-in lover, Fernande Olivier, and a stimulating, empathetic group of writer friends, poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and André Salmon. Like Picasso, Apollinaire had long been obsessed with circus performers: “Those who watch them have to be pious,” he wrote, “for [clowns] celebrate mute rites with difficult agility.” The two men spent almost every waking hour in each other’s company. According to Mailer, Apollinaire was a compendium of drunkard, scholar, and clown who “provided the poetic overlay needed for Picasso’s vision” of the clown. And as luck would have it, Cirque Medrano was in the neighbourhood.

Picasso attended performances several evenings a week, and after each show, would sit at the bar – “which was always thick with the hot, slightly sickening smell that seeped up from the stables,” according to Fernande – chatting with clowns: Ilès, Antonet, Alex, Rico, and Grock. To Picasso’s delight, Medrano’s clowns had forsaken their classic costumes in favour of more burlesque fashion. Their self-styled freedom to reinvent themselves was, in Picasso’s words, “a revelation.” It is little wonder his disguises – masks, exotic hats, and headdresses – became increasingly outrageous, or that he posed made-up before the camera and clowned about for visitors to his apartment.

Pablo Picasso, Acrobat’s Family with a Monkey (1905).
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Göteborg, Sweden

The Rose Period lasted from about 1904 to the beginning of 1906. During these years, Picasso’s work focussed on the families of saltimbanques – a migrant community of acrobats, musicians, and clowns who performed in the streets and outskirts of town. Art historian Patricia Leighten (writing in Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914) observes that Picasso identified saltimbanques with both himself and the artist in general as “rejected and misunderstood by a culture undeserving of their innocence or their art.” Were the saltimbanques Picasso’s psychic connection to this higher, “innocent” world – to an idealized, spiritual self?

Consider the well-known canvas Family of Saltimbanques  A vagabond troupe is travelling along a desolate road, in exile from society and from each other (none of the figures, including the harlequin at the far left who bears Picasso’s features, interacts with any other). A sense of disquiet prevails, a spiritual ennui of sorts – as if their “other-worldly” connection is weakening as a result of their transient state. In contrast, the Acrobat’s Family with a Monkey is a tender and intimate portrayal of a mother, father, and infant seated together. However, the work’s spiritual overtones are evident: The overall mood and composition are reminiscent of the infant Christ in the arms of the Madonna, according to Jack Flam in Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship. It is a “holy” family with a spiritual twist: The father is a harlequin. And there is also a monkey.

Such spiritual considerations are explored in the 1998 catalogue Picasso: The Italian Journey, 1917–24: The word “circus,” art historian Jean Clair explains, is derived from the circulus of antiquity, a reference to the orbits of planets, which in turn is linked to the sphere of the gods. Seen in this context, the circus is an alternate realm occupied by beings with “deep knowledge,” who can “see” the higher mysteries. “From the upper reaches of the marquee to the fairground mat,” writes Clair, “Picasso was dealing with a full cosmology and perhaps – beneath his figures’ nimble grace and melancholy – with a divination.”

However, the clowns in Picasso’s early paintings are consistently portrayed in everyday settings: in cafés, along roadsides, seated backstage. “Picasso never shows us the circus ring or the audience, as Degas, Lautrec, and Seurat do, nor are we given a look upward at the trapezists…until 1933,” writes biographer John Richardson in Life of Picasso. Instead, Picasso’s clowns roam freely about in whatever world they choose – a fitting choice on the artist’s part, especially if one considers the harlequin’s checkered (no pun intended) history.

The harlequin has long been associated with the god Mercury, alchemy, and the underworld. He is the Trickster – endowed with powers of invisibility, able to travel the world and to take on other forms – the unruly emissary between life and death, and the conscious and subconscious minds. In Study for the Death of Harlequin, Picasso’s subject is lying with his hands folded together as if in prayer, while two saltimbanques regard him intently – as if waiting for something to happen. Perhaps the trickster is not really dead. Or perhaps he is orchestrating his own resurrection: a Pierrot this time – harlequin’s alter ego, who dons a devilish mask and a ghostly white costume.

Writing for the catalogue The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown, Clair characterizes Pierrot as the “propitiatory victim of human stupidity…humiliated to the point of death…the embodiment of the myth of the crucified Christ.” However, Pierrot has played numerous roles throughout his long life, among them: harlequin’s carnival counterpart, commedia dell’arte’s idiot servant and grotesque rogue, and more recently, a poetic fellow – the ever-hopeful, but perpetually disappointed lover made famous by Jean Gaspard Deburau’s performances during the early- to mid-19th century.

Pierrot would re-emerge during Picasso’s so-called Italian period (1917–24), while the artist worked on Parade, a massive, painted stage curtain for Erik Satie’s ballet (of the same name), for which he also created the costumes and sets. Directed by Jean Cocteau, with choreography by Leonid Massine, the ballet opened in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet in May 1917. Picasso’s curtain portrays Pierrot and Harlequin among an eclectic gathering of circus performers and mythological beings and animals (such as Pegasus and a winged horsewoman) seated at a table and observing an angel ascend a ladder. While these ballet clowns appear to have shed their melancholy of the previous decade, his clown “portraits” completed a year later suggest otherwise.

In Pierrot  the subject is seated backstage, having removed his devilish mask. His white makeup appears to be running. On the table beside him lies an open book, a tantalizing detail given the clown’s requisite silence (his only mode of expression is mimicry, gesticulation, and grimaces). What “knowledge” does he possess? Of the ideal world he has left behind? Or of the horrors he has witnessed?

Clearly, Picasso’s clowns are resilient, adaptable creatures who have survived the aesthetic and emotional demands of the artist, including his Cubism experiments – although for a time, the clown merely served as an interesting motif for deconstruction (not so surprising, given the harlequin’s geometric-patterned costume). However, in the 1915 Cubist canvas Harlequin, Picasso’s subject takes on an intensely personal meaning: He is the harbinger of death, a ready vessel to contain the artist’s unbearable grief. In a letter to his friend and patron Gertrude Stein, Picasso laments: “My life is hell…. However, I have made a picture of a harlequin that…is the best thing I have ever done.” The “hell” to which Picasso refers was the illness that claimed the life of his lover of the time, Eva Gouel.

It is a hell he addresses in 1972, a year before he died, in Self-portrait, a harrowing evocation of Picasso’s preoccupation with death. Oversized, mismatched eyes stare mindlessly at the viewer from a skull-like, misshapen head supported by a shrivelled torso. A clown who has performed his last show, now
terrified, awaiting the inevitable? Anything is possible. Regardless, the clown (in all his incarnations) was Picasso’s talisman against such dread – and his muse, alter ego, and subconscious. Above all, he was Picasso’s psychic touchstone, his conduit to a deeper, more spiritual self, or several selves – whether of
this world or another.

– Dilys Leman