1901, Pablo Picasso, Évocation (L'Enterrement de Casagemas) [Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas)] -- Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris

From the museum label: Picasso was in Spain when he learned his friend Carlos Casagemas, aged twenty, had died by suicide in a Parisian café after a disappointment in love. This emotional shock was to inaugurate a decisive period in the artist's work: 'It was while thinking that Casagemas was dead that I began to paint in blue.' The Funeral transposes the codes of Spanish religious painting by conjuring Zurbarán and El Greco-from whom it borrows the superposition of two registers, Earthly and Celestial. Resituating the iconography of the lives of the saints in the contemporary world of prostitution, Picasso depicts the porch of the Saint-Lazare prison for women. Drawn and miserable, the 'working girls' watch over the deceased, as others accompany his ascent, on horseback, towards the blue-tinged clouds.

 

From the 2022 special exhibition label: An early Blue Period work, Evocation shows two episodes from the life of Picasso’s late friend Carles Casagemas, who had committed suicide earlier that year. The two had travelled to Paris together in 1900 and shared a studio in the city. In the lower portion of the painting, plainly dressed mourners stand around Casagemas’s body, which is about to be buried in a large tomb. Above them, Casagemas ascends to heaven, travelling by horse in the company of sex workers and a robed Madonna-like figure with children.

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