The Lonely Companion

#88011     36″ X 24″     oc

“In a cold winter night, a poor old blind guitarist was playing his instrument in a dark corner of a building, behind him stood the Eiffel Tower accompanied by a crescent”. This can be the beginning of a novel dated 1914, after the burst of the first world war.

Picasso arrived in Paris in 1900 for the record time and decided to live there. The poverty of his early stay there was reflected in many sensitive and melancholy works of his celebrated “Blue Period”. Picasso never painted the Eiffel Tower which had witnessed the glorious as well as miserable days of Paris. Chen appropriated Picasso’s “Blue” guitarist in order to evoke the memory of cruel hardship during the wartime when even the beautiful Icon of Paris became vulnerable, if not an irony to the stupidity of the war which would produce thousands and thousands of “models”, young and old, men and women for Picasso’s “Blue” motives.

– T. F. Chen