The Blue Period: A Novel by Luke Jerod Kummer: book review

The Blue Period (2019) is the re-imagined version of the life of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso in Paris. It is set from 1901 in Madrid to 1904 in Paris.

In October 1900, Pablo Picasso travelled to Paris with his friend Carles Casagemas for two months. Casagemas stayed in Paris, where he took his own life in February 1901 after a failed love affair. Picasso was devastated, resulting in his travels between Barcelona and Paris from May 1901 to 1904, drawing a series of paintings known as the Blue Period.

The author back-tracks to 1884 when Picasso is three years old, to detail his development as an artist—very briefly—as he fast-tracks to March 1899 when he meets Carles Casagemas—and the two months in Paris when Carles meets the love of his life: Germaine.

So half-way through the book the author starts the Blue Period.

In 1901, Pablo Picasso is nineteen years old. He was looking for artistic inspiration, and found it in the bohemian life in the streets of Paris. He meets Germaine and she becomes part of Pablo’s inspiration—this dark-haired muse—as does venereal disease. And so, Picasso finds a passion for the palette of paints. And goodness, how the last two years fly by.

There are no reference notes, although the author provides a list of reference books. However, readers don’t really know how close to, or far removed from, reality this re-imagined story is. I think it’s gone too far in the extremes of imagination, and not tastefully either.

It’s a bit too low-base for me on one end of the spectrum and too over-the-top at the other end of the spectrum: ‘Hair and beard grown long, Pablo renders every misery, painting with the zeal of an itinerant preacher who wills himself to the mountaintop so his voice might echo below.’

I think there needs to be more blue. Period.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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