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Following the rise of the avant garde art movements in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the inter war period was notable for a return to classicising principles. This return sprung from the previous avant garde with the intention of reinstating lasting values after the chaos and destruction which the war had involved.
Picasso's trip to Italy with Jean Cocteau in 1917 meant not only the appearance of a new woman in his life-Olga Koklova-and the beginning of a relationship with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but also the start of a new artistic language inspired by the classic European tradition of art (Raphael, Michelangelo and Ingres). However, as Pierre Daix has noted, Picasso's classicism is deceptive: it draws on antiquity (as he had previously done with African masks) in order to reinterpret traditional models through the Cubist experience. Cubism had given Pablo Picasso the keys to treat the various parts of the painting in different ways, to disrupt the norms of classical perspective and to include various different viewpoints within one composition.
Harlequin with a Mirror of 1923 is a typical work of this classicising period. In the scholarly literature on the artist it has generally been linked with a group of seated Harlequins which Picasso painted during the first part of 1923. The model was the Spanish painter Jacinto Salvadó, dressed in a Harlequin costume which Cocteau had given Picasso. A careful look at the entire group shows that the present painting is different from the others; in fact it is not even a true Harlequin. It rather brings together three figures from the circus and the Commedia dell'arte, which Picasso was so drawn to. The acrobat's clothes evoke the world of saltimbanques and acrobats; the two cornered hat is a clear reference to Harlequin, while the face turned into a mask is that of Pierrot, Columbine's spurned lover.
The present painting has recently been related to another one painted in the summer of 1923, The Pan Pipes (Musée Picasso, Paris), one of Picasso's masterpieces from his classic period. Against a schematic background of blue sky and sea, doubtless the Mediterranean, appear the figures of the two youths, one of whom is playing the Pan pipes. The flute made of several reeds, invented by the god Pan, had been used to play the music of love from ancient Greek times and had reached its apogee in the solos written by Debussy in L'Après midi d'un faune, which Picasso had seen Nijinsky dance so brilliantly in the Ballets Russes production by Diaghilev.
In the numerous preparatory drawings which the artist made for this painting, four figures usually appear: a couple formed by a young man and woman, Cupid or Love, placing a crown of flowers on the head of the woman, who is depicted as Venus, and lastly Pan playing the flute. The young man holding out the mirror to Venus, and who in some versions is dressed as a saltimbanque, is alone and has become the Harlequin with a Mirror of the present painting, which expresses his melancholy in the image which his face reflects in the mirror, a traditional attribute of disappointment and vanitas.
Some scholars such as William Rubin and Pierre Daix have related this group of works with the anguished love which Picasso was experiencing during the summer of 1923 in Cap d'Antibes. It should be remembered that Picasso considered Harlequin's temperament to be similar to his own in many ways and his use of this figure usually had some sentimental motive.
Harlequin with a Mirror and the Pan Pipes were the culmination of Picasso's classic period, but also marked its end. On his return to Paris in the autumn of 1923 the artist concentrated on a series of still lifes using a style which has been called Curvilinear Cubism, and which would gradually take him on to his Surrealist phase.
Paloma Alarcó
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