Connection between song and soul: Analysis of "The Old Guitarist"

The monochromatically blue color scheme of The Old Guitarist is quite dreary and solemn. The attention to detail in color and lines in the face and neck of the blind guitarist draws our eyes to look upon his grief-stricken state and see him as emotionally and physically worn down.

The forms we see in the image include a guitar held upright by an emaciated white-haired old man. His features are realistic in appearance but the conformation of his body is slightly distorted. He sits cross-legged, but his torso is slightly reclined and his white shoulder is exposed by his torn garment and protrudes far up as his head hangs in a near right angle to his spine. The shadowy depth of the guitarist’s hand on the neck of the guitar allows us to see the expressive movement of the bony musical fingers.

The painting comes from Picasso’s Blue Period, which began after a close friend committed suicide in Paris. This period was also influenced by the desolation, downtrodden misery and poverty he saw working on the outskirts of Paris. Young Picasso himself was also impoverished during 1902.

Picasso certainly expresses the deep sorrow of such conditions and of the tragedy of losing a close friend to suicide. The haggard guitarist sits in destitution, but the symbolic hope and escape of the comparably bright brown guitar shows an outlet of grief, a distraction from reality, a means for expressing the painful depths of one’s soul into the heartfelt strum of a guitar. The guitarist himself embodies hopelessness and despair; he can do nothing but to turn to the guitar.

Picasso caught my attention by evoking such a sense of sorrow and despair with The Old Guitarist. I certainly feel that sorrowful feelings and the image of a depressed state are of a universal nature. All people seek to find ways to make it through the hard times. I also feel that musical expression, of varying types, is a universally appreciated way to express feelings, to feed one’s soul, to vent. I relate very emotionally to the songs played at the memorial of a classmate who died in eighth grade, or to the songs I lived by during a confusing breakup, and although I use personal examples from adolescence to illustrate my point, I feel that the deep connection between song and soul is universally felt. Music seems to have the power and the sentiment to sustain, and this is what I see captured in The Old Guitarist.