La Vie

This is the largest painting of Picasso's Blue Period, made in Barcelona in 1903 when he was 21 and mostly broke. The blues match the mood: it is a picture about death and grief. The naked man at the left began, in Picasso's under-drawings, as a self-portrait, but he painted over his own face and gave the figure the features of his close friend Carlos Casagemas. Two years earlier Casagemas, heartbroken over a woman who had refused him, had shot himself in a Paris café in front of their friends. Picasso was shaken for years and returned to that death again and again. A mother holding a child stands opposite the couple, and between them are canvases showing hunched, huddled figures, so the whole scene reads like an argument about love and loss without spelling out an answer. It has been in Cleveland since 1945, the anchor of the museum's Picasso holdings.