Descripción
The painting belongs to the collection of Mrs. Dolly Bright Capen and is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
Neither this poster nor its motif have been reproduced on other posters.
This portrait of his friend, the painter Sebastiá Junyer-Vidal accompanied by a female figure, was dedicated to him by Picasso. He painted it in Riera de San Juan (Barcelona), in June 1903, during his Blue Period, and during his last stay in Barcelona after returning from his third trip to Paris.
The Master made numerous portraits of his friend Sebastiá. In this one, “he is shown sitting at a café table, motionless and as if abstracted from reality by a deep sleep, looking with bright eyes into the distance in front of him. At his side, a thin girl, with a very low-cut neckline and enormous addicted eyes, holds a flower in her thin mouth. She rests her arm on Junyer’s shoulder […]. However, there is no contact between these two beings, their gazes avoid each other, they continue in silence on the path of an unspeakable anguish. The painting is bathed in a blue shadow and a greenish moonlight: the only touches of colour are Junyer’s very red lips and a red flower in the girl’s hair, and this economy of effect makes the evocation of human isolation, the impenetrable loneliness of love, even more moving.”
“The Junyer-Vidal brothers had inherited a drapery, so Sebastiá spent more time on threads and lace than on painting.” During his visits, Picasso drew on papers, cards, etc., everything he found, “generally humorous and sometimes obscene themes.” The brothers kept all these drawings, forming an important collection of this “truly erotic theatre, incredibly fast-paced in this still deeply Victorian era.”
The red flower in the woman’s hair also stands out in the painting. It is a detail that Picasso would repeat twice more for the surprising effect it had when cutting out the blue monochrome.
