Pablo Picasso, "Two Sisters (The Meeting)", 1902

Hall №431

Two Sisters (The Meeting) is one of the most important items of his Blue Period, when the tragic mood of monochrome blue and bluish-green came to determine the whole structure of his paintings. The artist painted this large work in the summer of 1902 in Barcelona. "Art flows from pain and sadness" was Picasso's approach, which he realized with purely Spanish maximalism. The artist refracted through the prism of unhappiness and sorrow his own observations. On his return to Barcelona he wrote to his friend, the poet Max Jacob, "I am going to paint a picture, a drawing for which I am sending you. The meeting of a prostitute from the prison hospital with her sister, a nun." From this very concrete origin, the Hermitage painting developed until it gained a universal character. The composition recalls monumental religious art, summoning up direct associations with representations of the meeting of the Virgin Mary and the ageing Elizabeth, and with the ascetic figures of medieval mourners. The women seem to form a human arch - the image of an endless world. And the heroes of this world carry the cross of their own destiny with "tragic dignity."