Mothers and Muses

I was recently interested to come across a couple articles about the prevalence of the Mother and Child themes across Pablo Picasso's painting career; Motherhood as a Muse.  These paintings below were not as familiar, and I enjoyed 'meeting'  them, and seeing the differences in style at different times in the artist's career.

From Picasso's early 20th century pieces, through his post-war period, and  his 'neoclassical' period, he returned this theme, sometime with religious symbolism, or social commentary on the plight of the poor, and into changes in his life as he became a parent with his wife, Olga Khokhlova 

From PabloPicasso.org
'In the late summer of 1901 Picasso visited the women's prison of Saint-Lozore. His first-hand experience of this squalid environment informed the poverty-induced melancholy of many of his 'blue-period' works. The prison was, in some respects, the product of the social circumstances of turn-of-the-century Paris....

The prison, well known in its day, had become the subject of both artists and writers, and even appeared in the lyrics. of popular songs sung in the cafes and cabarets of Montmartre. Picasso's Mother and Child depicts on aspect of such incarceration that particularly disturbed the artist - the presence of children in the prison.
The mother, identifiable as a Saint-lazare inmate by her white bonnet, is represented as an abject figure whose attenuated form conveys a sense of overall despair. However, Picasso has allowed a sense of hope to permeate the work, through his obvious allusion to the Madonna and Child.'


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