In 1921, Picasso married the young Ballets Russe, Olga Khokhlova, and that same year had his first child, a boy, Paulo (left). Picasso's daughter, Maya, writes of his relationship toward his first-born:
The baby was always 'his' baby, at first an asexual creature expressing its needs in all the movements and gestures that Picasso now discovered. The baby became the principal, the unique subject of his work for a time. In these pictures the father seeks his own reflection--his origins--in the child. The mother becomes a gigantic stranger, utterly subservient to the plump body of the baby, for it is the baby alone that possesses the father, who is happy to find that he now has a double (Spies 59).
Maya's description of her father's relationship with his son suggests Picasso's association of himself with childish likenesses, a tendency which becomes relevant in our consideration of the 1905-1905 canvases. In fact, the smallness of this "double," its helplessness and state of perpetual growth and change, suggests that Picasso, as he settled (albeit temporarily) into life as a husband and father, felt similarly 'small' in an equally alien world. Picasso might indeed have identified with the physical and mental transformations of a young child, as he himself struggled to sculpt his own persona into 'Picasso,' a process which often meant isolating himself emotionally from people.
Maya Picasso goes on to write that even though Picasso was delighted with being a father early on, he gradually grew distant, as he found himself drawn further into his role as artist, which pulled him away from his other roles, including that of father and husband.
In short, Paulo, his mother, the family, the visits: it just wouldn't do anymore. Of course, Picasso had his moments of liberty, almost of happiness, when alone in his studio, which was up above the family area(60).
Interestingly, Maya later describes her own relationship with her father as one which seemed to be mediated by his art. She writes that he was often emotionally distant from her, even if emotionally engaged within himself. "I was simply there," she writes, "And I was to bring something new to his interpretation of the child: I was a girl" (Spies 60). That she refers to her father as 'Picasso' throughout her introductory essay to Werner Spies's World of Children further underscores her sense (and ours) of Picasso's emotional involvement in his art and not so much in the lives of those around him in later life. Like Max Jacob, they were subjects; but unlike the Picasso who painted Max Jacob in 1905, the Picasso of Maya's youth had become 'Picasso,' the persona, the artist.
Maya (pictured right) writes of her father's art as the way through which he related to his children:
When we were at the dining table, he would suddenly say, as he very often did: 'Don't move!' He went off to get paper--a pad or an exercise book--and a pencil or colored crayons, and then came back with them. He was happy, but I was stiff, rigid (Spies 61).
It seems that Picasso's connection with his children through his depictions of them--he almost never painted other people's children, but produced enough paintings and sketches of his own to fill Spies's anthology--were in fact his way of accessing his emotions toward them and toward his art itself. Obsessed with projecting a persona of rugged machismo and artistic as well as personal virility, a forcefulness or violence that we can sense in many of Picasso's paintings, Picasso might yet have indulged in a certain 'feminine' vulnerability in depicting his children. Maya provides a touching commentary on his paintings from her own and Paulo's later childhood:
The mothers in his work of this period have all the power he could muster. They idolize Woman. Each woman in his work epitomized the femininity he had dreamed of, in full bloom and radiantly happy, but alone with her child. A goddess of fecundity. There seems to be little concern for the role of man in the act of creation. I believe my father never really thought of himself in that role even in relation to us, his children, his own flesh and blood. His 'real' children were his paintings, his drawings, his prints, his sculptures, the things he caressed with his hands and his eyes(60).
Perhaps the "femininity he had dreamed of" was not sexual after all, but represented a sort of emotional link with the world, with other people, which Picasso somehow had difficulty achieving with actual people, at least after Max Jacob. Maya's description of the painting First Steps, of her younger brother Claude, gives us a clue where Picasso the artist and Picasso the father, the lover, the man, part:
Picasso has caught everything: the glance, the position of the hands escaping the mother's authority, the foot, the soles of the feet, the toes ready to crush the soil, ready to crush the whole world. For Picasso this was the most important moment in a person's life. Alone at last! It was the conquest of the self that pointed to the future conquest of others. It was a superb picture!(69).