Three Musicians

Pablo Picasso, 1921 · Gallery 513 · Floor 5

Look at these guys. Three of them, crammed together, mid-song. Big. Bright. Having a blast. And then you find out who they might be. And it stops being quite so fun. The harlequin in the middle, the one in the diamonds, that's Picasso. On the guitar. He painted himself as the harlequin over and over, so that one's pretty hard to miss. The other two, nobody can prove it, but they've usually been read as his two close friends. The poet Apollinaire, in the white Pierrot getup, on the clarinet. And the other poet, Max Jacob, dressed as a monk, with the sheet music. By the time Picasso paints this, Apollinaire's dead. Died young, two days before the war ended. Max Jacob's still around. But that same year, he'd left Paris and gone off to live near a monastery. Basically, like a monk. So Picasso's got one friend who's dead. One friend who's gone. And what does he 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 the thing is so bright, so happy, you almost miss how sad it is. Grief showing up in a clown suit. 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 runs into Jacob. All of them run into the walls. Maybe that's the whole trick. He's got these three friends back together, and he's not giving anybody enough room to leave. 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.

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