In fact, if we consider one of Picasso’s sketches of Max Jacob done during this period, we notice that Jacob appears both provocative and childlike, embodying Boas’s claim of projection of the adolescent state of one’s own emotions in ‘adolescent terms.’ In the sketch simply titled Max Jacob, Picasso depicts what might well be the archetype of Boy with a Pipe. In the sketch, Jacob, five years Picasso’s senior, is depicted as boyish and vacuous. Presumably the pipe in the sketch contains opium; Jacob has the same intoxicated stare that we find in Boy with a Pipe. Like the boy, his hair is tousled, his smock simple, his hand caught in the same enervated gesture. It is precisely this sense of enervation, of male submissiveness, which is often associated with male homosexuality and which particularly frightened Picasso.
As we have seen, from his youth, Picasso’s art was linked with his sense of personal and sexual virility. A precocious artist, Richardson, writes that he was also a “precocious lover,” claiming his first sexual experience to have occurred at the age of 13 (Richardson 68). His relationship with Jacob would have implied a sexual and thus artistic tenderness, bordering on weakness perhaps, that would have conflicted with Picasso’s quest for personal potency as an artist and as a masculine lover. Throughout his life, Picasso worried over the “artistic sterility” that he saw in other artists, a sort of impotence of the creative sense, which leads one to self-imitation. A friend, Gerald Nordland, quotes Picasso as saying, “One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility” (qtd. Seymour). Yet in his numerous paintings of nude adolescent males from this period, Picasso might doubly be ‘imitating himself.’ The young male bodies must have at least somewhat resembled his own (he was in his twenties at the time) and the images, if they allude to his homosexual desires and his relationship with Max Jacob, are not ‘art’ in a pure sense, but an outlet of personal emotion which Picasso would have recognized as self-imitative and therefore destructive.
Another Picasso sketch of Max Jacob, also simply titled Max Jacob (1905), reveals a creature so highly-feminized as to appear nearly sexless. This figure clearly harks to the ambiguously-gendered boys in Picasso’s 1905 paintings. One should also note Picasso’s addition of what appears to be a ruffled collar, which suggests a sort of captivity and submissiveness. This pale, androgynous figure is iconic of other of Picasso’s early 1905 children, many of whom are depicted with the same submissive ‘collar,’ as acrobats or harlequins. Thus while the figures may represent Picasso’s homosexual self, they also represent the figure principally associated with that version of himself, Max Jacob. Indeed by likening some of his earlier figures to Jacob, Picasso externalizes his homosexual identity by associating it with Jacob and then, through his paintings, supplants this figure with more virile likenesses representing a more artistically potent version of himself.