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Show Several days after our gallery tour, my mother took me to a frame shop and together we framed my Picasso print. She helped me choose the matting, a double mat in both sage and silver, as well as the frame, and we nailed the pieces together, strung wire through eyehooks, and papered the back. The framing cost thirty dollars, a tremendous amount of money at the time, years when we were each allowed one back-to-school outfit from the local Kmart, years in which we rarely ate out. In paying that sum, in giving me the gift of art, my mother made me feel special. I still have the painting; it hangs in my study. And every time I look at it I think of my mother and the day at the gallery and how my skirt flirted with my knees. Picasso's blue period only lasted three years, 1901-1904. Most critics find the paintings he completed during those years adolescent, even maudlin. The Tragedy is a painting of three figures, presumably a father, mother, and child, standing near a shore, huddled together in poverty and grief It is unclear just what the tragedy is-an illness, a death, hunger, or their mutual unavailability-so the tragedy becomes every tragedy. They bow their heads, perhaps against the wind, more likely against the weight that bears down on them. The child reaches up to the parents but is ignored. Picasso has elongated the figures, stretching their suffering from one end of the canvass to the other. At fifteen, I saw myself in the sadness. As an adult I discovered all that remains concealed in Picasso's The Tragedy. Artists reuse canvasses often, to save expense while still being able to practice. As a young artist, Picasso understood his financial limitations and, therefore, used the same canvass again and again. Close examination of The Tragedy reveals no less than three other paintings or sketches beneath the final work, including a painting of a bullring that 192 |