“Two Sisters” (“Date”) – Pablo Picasso, 1902
- Posted by Pablo Picasso
- Museum: Hermitage
- Year: 1902
Overview of the painting :
Two sisters. Date – Pablo Picasso. 1902. Oil on canvas. 152×100
The story of the plot of this work is simple and prosaic. The author “followed” her in one of the hospitals where prostitutes were treated. It is worth a closer look at the figures in order to understand the whole meaning of this meeting: in the arms of a young woman you can see the baby. A dissolute mother gives her unexpected child to the monastery in care.
In the eyes of the artist, this scene takes on deep, biblical meaning and meaning. The master in the image of the scene sends the viewer to the frescoes of Romanika and the mosaics of Byzantium. Here he accurately conveys poses and plastic figures, folds of clothes, the faces of heroines themselves. In mournful humility and without any condemnation, the nun is ready to accept the fruit of another’s sin. The petitioner, however, strikes the viewer with a doomed, hopeless, absent look. It is interesting that only one of the women, the one who brought the child, casts the shadow. This shadow is like a hint of the sinful past of the heroine.
Women bowed their heads in front of each other. In this position, both forgiveness and atonement. The only thing that is not in the picture is hope, love and faith. The righteous and sinner are equal figures before God. Hence the double name in which the key is the word “sisters”.
Iconical aesthetics further emphasizes the Christian content of the picture. The mood of work is emphasized calm, the atmosphere is cold, and the composition itself is static, so characteristic of the art of the Middle Ages, when the main thing in any work was a canon, a set of rules by which any image of a biblical plot related to the reflection of the sacred world is created.