The following information is provided as the long description of ‘The Old Guitar Player’, an art by Pablo Picasso:
When Picasso went to live in Paris where he was a small fish in a larger pond and had to struggle to figure where he fit into the society of artists there, he began to paint pictures of the downtrodden, depicting them in all of their misery, using a muted palette of blue — the color of melancholy.
His sadness during this period was intensified by the suicide of a young friend. This became known as his ‘Blue Period’ (1901-1904), one of two very prolific periods that were preambles to ‘Cubism’. Les miserables of the Blue Period gave way to the the clowns and other circus figures of the ‘Rose Period’ (1904-1906), a much more cheerful body of work over all. After that, beginning with his experiments in Cubism, Picasso became a power to be reckoned with in the world of modern art and continued to be an innovator of the highest order for the rest of his life.
One
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said to him, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.’
. . .
Read whole text of the poem on the ‘Portals to Creative Adventure’:
http://www.dotcalmvillage.net/nowwhatzinesep02/legacysep.html