Where is the picture of the girl on the ball. Interesting facts about Pablo Picasso's painting "Girl on a Ball"

The Pushkin Museum in Moscow has many wonderful paintings that capture the imagination of true art connoisseurs and ordinary sightseers. Artists Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Chagall - these names have forever entered the treasury of world painting. And “Girl on a Ball” (painting by Picasso) is one of those brilliant works in front of which you can stand spellbound for hours, enjoying the magical play of color and light, the amazing skill of the great artist. This picture is like a fairy tale that you want to believe in, despite any global complexities of human existence.

"Pink" period

Each work of a great artist has its own story. This picture is no exception. Young Pablo Picasso, settling in Paris at the beginning of the last century, comprehended the world of bohemia. In his poor art studio, even the water froze in winter - it was so cold. And in Montmartre there were frequent power cuts. But on the doors of the workshop there was an inscription “Meeting Place for Poets”, pleasing to the eye. The world of bohemia, rejected by ordinary people, firmly enters the life of Pablo Picasso. And the theme of kinship and human relations was in that period. The main characters, the heroes of the paintings, are traveling circus performers, comedians, artists and ballerinas, who, contrary to public taste, attracted the attention of young talent and aroused genuine participation and interest in him.

“Girl on a Ball”, painting by Picasso

At that time (1905), the artist was often inclined to choose the most ordinary subjects for his works. The heroes of this picture - wandering acrobats - capture the imagination of Pablo Picasso: a girl on a ball, fragile and tender, an athlete personifying masculinity and reliability. But the author does not simply copy life. He recreates it with his art and skill. And the work “Girl on a Ball” (a painting by Picasso from the “pink” period) is a vivid example of this! We seem to see dreams, love, devotion and tenderness, strength and courage. They need each other, since the work of traveling circus performers is dangerous and difficult, and they receive pennies for it.

Painting by Pablo Picasso “Girl on a Ball”: plot

The canvas depicts a seated adult male acrobat and a fragile girl gracefully balancing on a ball. It is in the contrast of these two figures, their plasticity and massiveness, grace and strength, that many critics see the highlight of the work. The theme of friendship, internal community and mutual assistance is also visible in the work. The artist is attracted by the language of contrasts and plasticity, which helps create harmony in the composition of the painting. After all, you must admit that if you imagine for a moment just a girl balancing, then without the silent support of a sitting circus performer she can instantly lose her balance, slipping off the ball. The man’s leg bent at a right angle is perceived figuratively as a kind of support for the girl’s fragile figure.

All the magic that permeates the work of the great master is also based on the magic of lighting, the harmony of colors, and the precision of strokes. It’s as if the figures have no feeling of constraint, and the space of the canvas is spread apart and filled with air. At the same time, the author also uses a coarsening of the texture of painting, a simplification of the style that appeared in earlier years.

Despite the apparent roughness of the image, the work conveys a light and gentle mood, described in pink and blue tones, with shades of ashen. These tones additionally create the impression of a romantic reality of life.

History of the painting after painting

It is known that Pablo Picasso was pleased in 1906 when the collector Vollard bought as many as 30 paintings from him for only two thousand francs. After this, the canvas was in both the famous collection and the Kahnweiler collection. Industrialist-collector and philanthropist Morozov bought it in 1913 for 16 thousand. So “Girl on a Ball,” a painting by Picasso, ended up in Russia, where it is still in the Pushkin Museum.

Pablo Picasso painted "Girl on a Ball" in 1905. Today the painting is in the collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin

Reflecting on the difficult lot of free artists, Picasso depicts a family of circus performers against the backdrop of a desert landscape. It seems to expose the “behind the scenes” of the circus arena and shows that this life is full of hardships, exhausting work, poverty and everyday disorder.

The picture is filled with colossal tension and drama. Picasso very accurately described here the psychological state of a hysterical girl, who is in an extremely unstable state. She balances on the “ball” of her own nascent sexuality, trying to maintain a balance between arousal, desire and prohibition.

1. Central figures

A fragile girl and a powerful athlete are two equal figures that form the central core of the composition. The gymnast carefreely demonstrates her skills to her father, but he does not look at her: his gaze is turned inward, he is immersed in thoughts about the fate of the family. These images, strongly contrasting with each other, symbolically resemble scales: it is not clear which of the bowls will weigh. This is the main idea of ​​the film - the hope placed on the future of children is opposed to doom. Moreover, their chances are equal. The fate of the family is left to the will of fate.

2. Girl on the ball

In fact, this is a little Lolita who is looking for her father’s love - the athlete may also be her older brother, but it doesn’t matter, in any case, we have a mature man, a father figure. She feels that she is not needed by her mother, and in search of love she turns to the nearest male figure. As befits a hysteric, she seduces, plays, captivates and cannot calm down or gain stability. She balances between mother and father, between desire and prohibition, between childhood and adult sexuality. And this balance is very important. Any wrong movement can lead to a fall and injury, which will disrupt its development.

3. Athlete

The man’s reaction is very important - he does not give in to temptation, does not react to the sexual provocations of the girl who seduces him. If he accepted her right to an adult sex life, it would lead to her falling off the ball. She maintains balance due to the fact that he is stable, reliable, stable in his fatherly role. He does not forbid her to dance in front of him, does not forbid her to seduce him. He gives her this space to develop.

But it is obvious that there is a struggle going on inside him as well. It is no coincidence that his face is turned to the side: in order to cope with excitement and overcome his feelings, he cannot look at the girl. The intense blue of his swim trunks and the fabric he is sitting on highlights the conflict between arousal and inhibition.

4. Kettlebell

The object that the athlete holds in his hand is very similar to a weight (4). It is located right at the level of his genitals. He can't put it on for some reason. And this is an additional sign of instability. We see how tense his back muscles are. By holding a kettlebell, the athlete fights sexual tension within himself. Without realizing it, he is afraid that if he puts the weight down and relaxes, he may find himself at the mercy of sexual feelings and succumb to them.

Figures in the background

In the background we see the figure of the gymnast’s mother (5) with her children, a dog and a white horse. The black dog (6) was usually a symbol of death and served as an intermediary between different worlds. The white horse (7) here acts as a symbol of fate and has long been endowed with the ability to predict it.

It is symbolic that the mother’s back is turned to the girl on the ball. When a woman takes care of an infant, she turns all her attention to him, psychologically distances herself from older children, and they begin to feel frustration. And they turn to their father in search of his love, attention and support. Here this moment is clearly shown: both girls have turned away from their mother and are looking towards their father.

Ball and cube

The ball (8) has always been considered one of the most perfect and significant geometric figures; it personifies harmony and the divine principle. A smooth ball with an ideal surface has always been associated with happiness, the absence of obstacles and difficulties in life. But the ball under the girl’s feet has an irregular geometric shape and tells us about her difficult fate.

The cube (9) symbolizes the earthly, mortal, material world, most likely the world of the circus, to which the athlete belongs. The cube looks like a box for storing circus props, and the father is ready to give them to his daughter, but does not yet want to reveal to her the whole truth of circus life: he would like a better fate for his children.

Color composition

In the images of the mother, tightrope walker and elements of the athlete’s clothing, cold blue-ash tones predominate, symbolizing sadness and doom: these people can no longer escape the “circus circle”. The absence of shadows on the canvas is also a symbol of hopelessness. In many cultures, the shadow was endowed with a sacred meaning: it was believed that a person who lost it was doomed to death.

Hope is symbolized by the red color spots that are present in the children's clothing. At the same time, the youngest daughter is completely dressed in this color - she has not yet been touched by circus everyday life. And the eldest is already almost completely “captured” by the world of the circus - she only has a small red decoration in her hair.

It is curious that the figure of the athlete himself is painted with a predominance of light, pinkish shades - the same as in the background landscape. And this is no coincidence. Another, better world is somewhere beyond the hills, and it is from there that the divine light emanates, symbolizing hope: after all, the athlete himself, in spite of everything, is hope for the girl and the family.

The color red is associated with bright, openly demonstrated sexuality. It seems that only the little girl in the red dress has it (10). Children at this age do not yet know excessive prohibitions; they may have various infantile sexual fantasies. She is still firmly on her feet, she is still far from the man and is not afraid of getting burned.

The girl on the ball is like a butterfly next to the fire. Its purple color is associated with excitement and tension, but it does not turn into intense blue, the color of total prohibition. Interestingly, the purple color comes from a combination of red and blue.

White horse

In psychoanalysis, the horse symbolizes passion, the wild unconscious. But here we see a white horse (7) grazing peacefully, which is located directly between the athlete and the gymnast. For me, it symbolizes the possibility of integration and positive development. This is a sign of hope that forbidden sexual tension will subside and passions will be tamed.

Excitement will promote the development of each of them. The girl will grow up and feel emotional, sexual with another man, and the athlete will be a mature father for his children and a reliable husband for his woman.

About the experts

Psychoanalyst, Doctor of Psychology, director of the master's program "Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic business consulting" at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, head of the master's program "Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy" at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

art critic, independent business consultant, coach, studies psychoanalysis and business consulting at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

Which was written in 1905. Canvas, oil. 147 × 95 cm. The painting was purchased in Paris in 1913 by Russian businessman, philanthropist, and art collector Ivan Abramovich Morozov. Currently, the work is in the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin in Moscow.

The painting “Girl on a Ball” is a striking example of the “pink period” of Pablo Picasso’s work, or rather a work of the transition period from “blue” to “pink”. If in the “blue period” Picasso increasingly gave preference to various human sufferings, which is why they were rather gloomy and dull, then the “rose period” in his art is more joyful and life-loving. In this picture we can see that in Picasso’s work some consequences of the “blue period” are still preserved - a dull landscape, but positive changes are already emerging in favor of a new period - the image of cheerful circus performers.

In the center of the picture there are two figures - a girl who balances on a ball, and a man who sits opposite on a cube. In the background we can see a woman with a child, a dog and a horse. This picture is built on contrasts - a fragile girl and an overweight man, a blue girl and a pink man, an unstable ball that is difficult to stand on, and a monolithic cube, the cheerful mobility of a girl and the frozen silence of a circus performer. The idea of ​​the painting was to show time and constancy, movement and stillness. The contrast of opposites is also complemented by the terrain. Unlike the usual surroundings of circus performers - crowds of spectators, here there is only a scorched desert with two people and two animals. Picasso also placed circus performers in such an environment because he wanted to show the essence of circus performers, who in their lives not only have performances and applause, but also hard training, need, experiences, and suffering.

“Girl on a Ball” painting by Pablo Picasso

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The thin figure of the tightrope walker - an obvious contrast with the massive figure of the strongman in the foreground - is crowned with arms directed to the sky. This is how the heroine tries to find balance on an unstable ball. The image itself is not unique: Picasso’s rose period (around 1904-1906) is often also called the circus period; circus performers, including acrobats and tightrope walkers, populate many of his works from this time. Nevertheless, in “Girl on a Ball” the artist managed to find an interesting compositional solution: the gesture of the main character seems to connect her figure with the sky - it is easy to notice that the color of her tights is closest to the bluish tint of the sky.

Pablo Picasso. A family of comedians. 1905
National Gallery of Art, Washington

Pablo Picasso. Actor. 1904-1905
Wikimedia Commons

Pablo Picasso. An acrobat and a young harlequin. 1905
Wikimedia Commons

Athlete's back

In contrast to the thin, disembodied figure of the girl, the monumental back of the athlete, which occupies a good half of the foreground of the picture, is rendered in ocher-pink, “consumptive”, according to Apollinaire, tones that echo in the earthy hills of the background landscape. Thus, the opposition central to “The Girl on the Ball” is emphasized on many levels at once: not only “feminine - masculine”, not only “youth - maturity”, not only “fragility - stability”, but also “heaven - earth”, “ spirit is matter."

Ball and cube

According to some researchers, the image of a girl on a ball goes back to the Renaissance iconography of the goddess of fate, Fortune, while the stable cube on which the athlete sits is associated with the concept of Valor. A Latin proverb says: “Sedes Fortunae rotunda, sedes Virtutis quadrata” (literally “The seat of Fortune is round, the seat of Valor is square”). It is unknown whether Picasso intended such an interpretation of the images in the painting, but it seems quite possible, given his love of artistic allegories, and also the fact that by 1905 he had already been moving in Parisian intellectual circles for several years and attended lectures by the poet Moreas, who proclaimed a return to the ideals of Greco-Latin literature.

Traces of the second foot and right knee

Despite the fact that the artist shows the athlete from the back and we see only one of his legs, if you look closely, you can distinguish the second foot and right knee in the picture: at first the strongman’s pose was slightly different, but then Picasso changed the composition. According to one hypothesis, this was due to the fact that the painter was concerned about the topic of support - both in a moral sense (circus performers, as well as avant-garde artists, were considered outcasts in society and could only rely on each other), and materially. -physical. In the final version of “Girls on a Ball,” it turns out that the tightrope walker partly relies on the athlete: if you mentally remove his figure from the picture, the fragile balance will be destroyed and the girl will fall. Apparently, the second leg weakened this effect, and therefore it was decided to abandon it. The motif of support is clearly embodied in other works by Picasso, for example in “The Old Jew with a Boy.” On the other hand, he sometimes treated human limbs quite freely in his works: in the later “Portrait of Paul in a Harlequin Costume,” the artist’s son seems to grow an extra leg.

Figures in the background

Picasso's circus performers are never shown at work - the scenes with their participation are transferred to the space of a certain conventional desert landscape. This is exactly what happens with “The Girl on the Ball”: the landscape behind the backs of the main characters is depicted in the form of a sequence of horizontal plans of different colors - against this background, the vertical dynamics of the athlete and tightrope walker are perceived especially vividly. The human figures in the background are typical staffage: painters of the 16th-17th centuries made it a rule to depict them on their canvases to enliven the landscape. It is characteristic that these figures have their backs turned to the main scene of the picture and are clearly moving away, indifferent to the tricks that the strongman and the tightrope walker are rehearsing. According to one version, this is a statement by the artist on the lack of demand for their art, which he largely likened to his own.

Horse

“Girl on a Ball” is a rare example of a composition by Picasso with successively opening spatial plans to the viewer: in the first there is an athlete; on the second - an equilibrist; on the third there is a figure of a mother with children and a dog; finally, in the last, fourth, there is a white horse grazing in the landscape. The horse is a cross-cutting image in the artist’s paintings of this period: it also appears in “Boy Leading a Horse” and in a large number of sketches - for example, “Harlequin on a Horse” and “Family of Comedians.”

The graceful, miniature “girl on a ball” in Pablo Picasso’s painting was not originally a girl at all

Painting “Girl on a Ball”
Oil on canvas, 147 x 95 cm
Year of creation: 1905
Now kept in the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin in Moscow

In Montmartre, in the abode of the poor and bohemians, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso felt among kindred souls. He finally moved to Paris in 1904 and spent several times a week at Medrano’s circus, whose name was given by the city’s favorite clown, Jerome Medrano, a compatriot of the artist. Picasso became friends with the troupe's artists. Sometimes he was mistaken for an immigrant acrobat, so Picasso became a part of the circus community. Then he began to paint a large picture about the life of artists. Among the heroes of the canvas were a child acrobat on a ball and an older comrade watching him. However, during the process of work, the idea changed radically: according to X-ray studies carried out in 1980, the artist completely rewrote the painting several times. In the resulting painting, “Family of Acrobats,” the teenager on the ball is no longer present. The artist turned the episode that remained in the sketches into another smaller painting - “Girl on a Ball.” According to British art critic John Richardson, who knew Picasso, the artist painted it on the back of a painted-over portrait of a man to save money on canvas and paint for “A Family of Acrobats.”

In Russia, “The Girl on the Ball” has become much more popular than the large painting since it was purchased in 1913 by philanthropist Ivan Morozov and ended up in Moscow. In Novorossiysk in 2006, a monument was erected to the acrobat from Picasso’s masterpiece.

Right: A boy balancing on a ball. Johannes Goetz. 1888

1 Girl. The teenager’s pose is unlikely to have been drawn from life: even an experienced acrobat could not hold this position for more than a couple of seconds. John Richardson saw the artist's source of inspiration in the bronze figurine "Boy Balancing on a Ball", created by Johannes Goetz in 1888. And in the first sketches of this plot, Picasso, according to Richardson, had not a girl, but a boy.

2 Ball. Leading researcher at the Hermitage Alexander Babin suggested that the ball on which the acrobat is balancing is, according to Picasso’s plan, the pedestal of the goddess of fate. Fortune was traditionally depicted standing on a ball or wheel, symbolizing the impermanence of human happiness.

3 Athlete. Richardson wrote that Picasso was probably posed by a friend from Medrano's circus. The artist made the figure of the strong man deliberately geometric, anticipating a new direction - cubism, of which he soon became one of the founders.

4 Pink. The period from the end of 1904 to 1906 in Picasso’s work is conventionally called “circus” or “pink”. American specialist in 20th century art E.A. Carmine explained the artist’s passion for this color by the fact that the dome in the Medrano circus was pink.

5 Landscape. Art critic Anatoly Podoksik believed that the area in the background resembles the mountainous Spanish landscape. Picasso depicted not artists hired for a stationary circus, but part of a traveling troupe, which he saw in his childhood in his homeland.

6 Flower. In this context, the flower with its short-lived beauty is a symbol of fleetingness, the brevity of existence.

7 Horse. In those days, the main animal in the life of circus performers. Horses pulled wagons of traveling performers; riders' acts were necessarily included in the program of stationary circuses.

8 Family. Picasso depicted circus performers in everyday life, with children more often than in the arena. In his paintings, art critic Nina Dmitrieva noted, the troupe is an ideal model of a family: artists stick together in a world where, like other representatives of bohemia, they are considered marginal.

9 Cube. Alexander Babin, citing a Latin proverb Sedes Fortunae rotunda, sedes Virtutis quadrata(“The throne of Fortune is round, but that of Valor is square”), wrote that the static cube in this case serves as the pedestal of the allegory of Valor, in contrast to Fortune on an unstable ball.

Artist
Pablo Picasso

1881 - was born in the Spanish city of Malaga in the family of an artist.
1895 - entered the Barcelona School of Arts and Crafts.
1897–1898 - Studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid.
1904 - moved to France.
1907 - created a painting in which there was a turn towards cubism and because of which there were rumors that the artist had gone crazy.
1918–1955 - was married to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. The marriage produced a son, Paulo (Paul).
1927–1939 - an affair with Marie-Therese Walter, the daughter of a milliner. The lovers had a daughter, Maya.
1937 - wrote "Guernica", one of the most famous anti-war paintings in the world.
1944–1953 - an affair with the artist Françoise Gilot, who bore him a son, Claude, and a daughter, Paloma.
1961 - married Jacqueline Rock.
1973 - died of pulmonary edema at his villa Notre-Dame de Vie in Mougins, France.

Illustrations: Alamy / Legion-media, AKG / East News, National Gallery of Art