[Picasso] was indeed industrious these days. For over a year, one painting after another would be added to the Blue Period, even if they were almost impossible to sell. In later decades, the opposite phenomenon occurred, and the prices were higher than for any other examples of twentieth-century art. These distillations of suffering and want either exorcise the guilt of mammon or else make it more enjoyable.* One ought to add to that part of the power of these paintings is due to the artist’s depression, his prodigious woe. If he has deep intimations of how much more he can see than other artists, then his life must become a mission, even a crusade. Yet, there is so large a part of him that is materially passionate, ordinary, and small-which is to say, middle-class-with a greedy desire for recognition, precisely what the paintings of the Blue Period are not bringing him at all. There is a rich irony. Perhaps such works did not sell in those years because the people who viewed them were not yet wealthy enough. The Blue Period speaks to the profound contradictions of those very rich who are invariably weary in spirit and never free altogether of depression. How can they not be miserable? Great wealth induces greed and treachery in everyone within the court of the tycoon; honest relations are consumed by dishonest appetites; the man of great wealth often lives in gloom amid sensations of profound isolation. The guilt accompanying great wealth presses upon the rich man’s psyche powerfully enough to suggest the overburdened backs of Picasso’s blue-tinted victims and orphans; yes, the prodigiously wealthy collector can feel kinship with the poor, and solace as well for his guilt inasmuch as the power of the Blue Period lies in its suggestion that poverty is not a reflection of temporal passing conditions but is as universal as life. That makes wealth a little more palatable! Indeed, by such a logic, wealth and poverty are each other’s counterparts-universals! Ergo, the Blue Period would come into commercial fashion about the time collectors of sufficient wealth encountered the works. Nor did it hurt that Picasso was, by then, well established and his later paintings much more difficult to comprehend. There is an added marrow of satisfaction in purchasing the early work of a great and near-unfathomable genius. Of course, the irremediable bitterness in Picasso’s soul, the power of the inner sanction that he felt later in life to wound and humiliate others, had to come in part out of the paradox that the paintings that brought him the greatest sums were precisely the works which had cost him the most miserable days of his life. -Norman Mailer Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man *Richardson