THREE MUSICIANS
PABLO PICASSO, 1921
Look at these guys. Three of them, all dressed up, crammed together, mid-song. Loud. Bright. Having a blast. And then you find out who they are. And it stops being fun. The harlequin in the middle, the one in the diamonds, that's Picasso. He painted himself as the harlequin his whole life, so that one's not really up for debate. The other two, nobody can prove it, but everybody's always read them as his two best friends. The poet Apollinaire, in the white Pierrot getup. And the other poet, Max Jacob, in the dark robe. Here's the thing, though. By the time he paints this, neither of them is around anymore. Apollinaire died young, two days before the war ended. And Max Jacob gave the whole world up and went off to live in a monastery. So what does Picasso do? He paints them back. Sticks all three of them in one room, hands out the instruments, starts the band up again. Like nothing happened. And it's so loud and so bright you almost miss how sad it is. Grief showing up in a clown costume. Then look at the bodies. Try to find where one guy ends and the next one starts. You can't. Picasso runs into Apollinaire, Apollinaire into Jacob, all of them into the walls. Maybe that's the whole point. He's not really painting three friends. He's just not letting them come apart. And down under the table, there's this little black dog. Barely there. Everything else in here is shouting, and the dog just stays low and quiet. Some stuff in a painting isn't there to be figured out. It's just there because the room needed it.