9 Things You Might Not Know About Picasso’s ‘The Old Guitarist’

Don’t be deceived by this seemingly simple painting of a man and his instrument. Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist has secrets in its past and in its paint. 

The Old Guitarist is the most iconic work of Picasso’s Blue Period.

This chapter in the seminal painter’s career—which lasted from 1901–1904—began with Casagemas in His Coffin, a work depicting a dearly departed friend in his final repose. (The pair was close, and Casagemas’s death in 1901 contributed to Picasso’s depression.) From there came many more solemn portraits of despair, desperation, and desolation that appear on museum walls all over the world. But none has come close to surpassing the popularity of The Old Guitarist.

Picasso could relate to his penniless guitar player. 

At 22, Picasso projected his sadness on many paintings from his Blue Period through monochromatic, flat representation—including The Old Guitarist, which he began in late 1903 and finished in 1904. According to the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the painting, “The image reflects ... Picasso’s personal struggle and sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden; he knew what it was like to be poor, having been nearly penniless during all of 1902.” The only element of The Old Guitarist that is not devotedly blue is the man’s guitar. Through his art, the player finds solace. The brightness of the guitar could be seen to speak to how Picasso viewed his own art as a bright spot even in his darkest times. 

The guitarist appears to be blind. 

Marginalized and deprived people were often the subject pieces in the Blue Period. Picasso was especially intrigued by blindness, and seemingly blind figures can be found in several of his works. The etching The Frugal Repast (1904) depicts a blind man and a sighted woman sharing a sparse meal. The artist tackled a similar subject—minus the companion—with The Blind Man’s Meal in 1903. That same year, he created the portrait Celestina, which shows a woman with one milky unseeing eye. And then there’s the subject of The Old Guitarist: Observe his closed eyes, averted from the world and the instrument he plays. It’s theorized that a key influence of the painting was Symbolist literature, which often employed blind characters to suggest a vision beyond this world.  

The Old Guitarist’s composition is a nod to El Greco.

Picasso was fond of El Greco because he was overlooked by scholars in favor of other Renaissance and Mannerist painters of the time. The guitarist’s head, which crooked at a jarring angle, and his legs, which are curled in, make him appear cramped within the frame. Art historians suggest Picasso chose this angular pose accented by elongated limbs as a nod to the celebrated 16th-century artist.

The Old Guitarist is bigger than you’d expect. 

Because the guitar player is contorted and cramped within the frame, you might think that the painting was created on a small canvas, but it actually measures in at 48.375-by-32.5 inches. 

The Art Institute of Chicago made history with the painting.

When the Art Institute of Chicago acquired The Old Guitarist in 1926, it was a pivotal moment for the artist: The work became his first painting to be acquired by an American museum, and according to the Art Institute of Chicago, it was also the first Picasso painting that any museum in the world had acquired for its permanent collection. 

This piece may have inspired poetry ...

In 1937, American Modernist Wallace Stevens published the lengthy poem “The Man With The Blue Guitar.” Despite a seemingly obvious link between the painting and the poem, Stevens denied any connection to Picasso’s work, claiming, “I had no particular painting of Picasso’s in mind and even though it might help to sell the book to have one of his paintings on the cover, I don’t think we ought to reproduce anything of Picasso’s.”

... and it definitely inspired musicians.

In a 2016 conversation with Rolling Stone, Paul McCartney revealed that he was with his then-wife, Linda, in a clinic after the birth of their daughter. “I’m sitting around eating chips with my guitar in the clinic, goofing around with it. And there was a picture on the wall that I’d been looking at for days—Picasso, The Old Guitarist. ... and a light bulb went off in my head: ‘What chord is that?’ It looked like it was two strings. ‘You know what would be cool? To write a song with only two fingers.’ ” He wrote a melody based on the idea in 1969, but he didn’t use it. (Kayne West would eventually use it in his song “All Day”: “I was telling Kanye this story. I whistled it for him. His engineer was recording it, and it went into the pool of ingredients,” McCartney said.) The Counting Crows also reference the painting in their hit “Mr. Jones”: “Yeah, well, you know gray is my favorite color / I felt so symbolic yesterday / If I knew Picasso / I’d buy myself a gray guitar and play.”

There’s a woman hiding on the canvas.

If you look closely at the space above the guitar player’s ear, through the blue-gray paint, you might make out a forehead and eyes. This ghostly woman invited further study, so in the 1990s, the Art Institute of Chicago studied it in a conservation lab using infrared scans and X-rays to see what Picasso had painted over. What was discovered was an abandoned portrait of a nude young woman, seated and nursing a child from her right breast, as well as a calf and cow. It’s not the only Picasso painting that’s hiding something, either.

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A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.