The Old Guitarist

Painting by Pablo Picasso

The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. At the time of The Old Guitarists creation, Modernism, Impressionism, Post Impressionism, and Symbolism had greatly influenced Picasso's style. Furthermore, El Greco, Picasso's poor standard of living, and the suicide of a dear friend influenced Picasso's style at the time which came to be known as his Blue Period. And yet, despite the isolation, the guitarist (artist) depends on the rest of society for survival. All of these emotions reflect Picasso's predicament at the time and his criticism of the state of society. The Old Guitarist becomes an allegory of human existence.</blockquote>

In The Old Guitarist, Picasso may have drawn upon George Frederic Watts's 1886 painting of Hope, which similarly depicts a hunched, helpless musician with a distorted angular form and predominantly blue tone.

Recent x rays and examinations by curators found three figures peering behind the old guitarist's body. The three figures are an old woman with her head bent forward, a young mother with a small child kneeling by her side, and an animal on the right side of the canvas. Despite unclear imagery in crucial areas of the canvas, experts determined that at least two different paintings are found beneath The Old Guitarist. In 1998, researchers used an infrared camera to penetrate the uppermost layer of paint (the composition of The Old Guitarist) and clearly saw the second most composition. By using this camera, researchers were able to discover a young mother seated in the center of the composition, reaching out with her left arm to her kneeling child at her right, and a calf or sheep on the mother's left side. Clearly defined, the young woman has long, flowing dark hair and a thoughtful expression. The Art Institute of Chicago shared its infrared images with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., where curator William Robinson identified a sketch by Picasso sent to his friend Max Jacob in a letter. It revealed the same composition of mother and child, but it had a cow licking the head of a small calf. In a letter to Jacob, Picasso reveals he was painting this composition a few months before he began The Old Guitarist. Despite these discoveries, the reason Picasso did not complete the composition with a mother and child, and how the older woman fitted into the history of the canvas, remain unknown.

As one of Picasso's more notable Blue Period works, The Old Guitarist has influenced other artists of all backgrounds. For example, Paul McCartney was inspired from a copy of the painting hanging on a wall to create a chord progression. This progression and McCartney's accompanying melody were his contributions to the 2015 Kanye West song "All Day". The Old Guitarist is also referenced in the Counting Crows song "Mr. Jones". The speaker alludes to this painting in the third verse of the song: "You know gray is my favorite color/I felt so symbolic yesterday/If I knew Picasso/ I would buy myself a gray guitar and play ".