induscrypt/painting

From the page: "Charles Morice focused on it in an essay he wrote for the Mercure de France while the Weill show was still on.
It is extraordinary, this sterile sadness which weighs down the entire work of this very young man. His works are already numberless.... He seems a young god trying to remake the world. But a dark god. Most of the faces he paints grimace; not a smile. His world is no more habitable than lepers' houses. And his painting itself is sick. Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?

It was an extraordinarily powerful piece, and it shook Picasso. He wanted to meet Morice, as if the man who had so accurately diagnosed his state of mind might also be able to provide a cure. Morice, a good friend of Paul Gauguin's, introduced him to Noa Noa, Gauguin's autobiographical poem. Picasso's deep-rooted pessimism was pitted against Gauguin's primitive, questing optimism. "Where are we coming from? Who are we? Where are we going?" Gauguin asked, and although Picasso never formulated those questions in words, they were all there in his work and in the restlessness of his life.

BLUE was still dominant on his canvases, but a rose glow began to creep in, anticipating a major change in his life. In the afternoon of August 4, 1904, in the middle of an unexpected thunderstorm, he was on his way to his studio"