The Old Guitarist

A blind, emaciated old man hunches over his guitar in a cramped angular pose, his elongated limbs and bowed head wrapped in pervasive cold blue, the instrument the one warm brown note in his bleak world. Picasso painted the Old Guitarist at the depth of his Blue Period, when poverty, blindness, and music recur as themes of human suffering and consolation. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, it is the masterpiece of those years - the distorted, El Greco-like figure an unforgettable emblem of destitution, and of art clung to in the dark.