An expert's guide to Picasso's Blue Period: five must-read books on the Spanish painter's early career

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Pablo Picasso is one of the most written about artists of all time, making it difficult to know where to start. So where better than the beginning, with his first major artistic phase: the Blue Period? Spanning 1901-04, the Blue Period was characterised by monochromatic paintings of sombre scenes and was influenced by the suicide of Picasso’s close friend Carles Casagemas. A major exhibition on the Blue Period, travelling from Toronto, is due to open at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC later this month. Ahead of the show’s opening, the co-curator Susan Behrends Frank has selected five books that capture this pivotal period of art history.

A Life of Picasso I: The Early Years: 1881-1906 (1991) by John Richardson with Marilyn McCully

“This first volume in John Richardson’s magisterial biography is brilliant in its historical achievement. The command of facts and insights into Picasso’s early life and creative process is combined with aesthetic sensibility about his work over these crucial years that includes a candid understanding of the young Spaniard’s ambition. Richardson’s prose takes the reader on a fascinating journey that is boldly drawn with vivid descriptions of the major and minor players along the way. It is must-reading for anyone interested in early Picasso.”

Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906 (1997) catalogue, edited by Marilyn McCully

“Apart from Richardson’s biography, the most interesting and important information about early Picasso and the Blue Period is found in exhibition catalogues from the past 25 years. The National Gallery of Art’s 1997 catalogue was the first to bring together a vast amount of archival research combined with hundreds of paintings, drawings and sculptures—many not previously known—in order to allow the reader to follow the scope of Picasso’s early transformation.”

Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods (2019) catalogue, edited by Raphaël Bouvier

“This beautiful publication by the Fondation Beyeler includes a chronology presented as yearly journals and handsome reproductions with extensive catalogue entries and provenance information. The essays are short but filled with new insights, especially about Saint-Lazare, the Paris women’s hospital-prison so important to the Blue Period.”

Picasso and the Mysteries of Life: La Vie (2012) by William Robinson

“This small-scale publication carries big impact in its in-depth look at Picasso’s 1903 painting La Vie, one of the most important works of the Blue Period. William Robinson has written a compelling story about this enigmatic masterwork that includes scientific information about hidden imagery. It makes for a fascinating read as he carefully reveals layer by layer the complexity of identifying Picasso’s hidden meanings and the difficulty of settling on a final interpretation for this allegorical canvas.”

Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier (2001) by Fernande Olivier

“Fernande Olivier was Picasso’s first great love and lived with him from 1905 to 1912, with many ups and downs. She was a beautiful and fascinating woman who was talented and very self-aware. Loving Picasso reveals not only her life with Picasso during those tumultuous years, which she writes about with incredible bluntness, but also her life before Picasso with much insight into the demands of being an artist’s model in the early 20th century. Her memoirs and the directness of her writing are highly informative in their detail and give insight into who Picasso was as a person.”

• Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 26 February-12 June

• Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, Susan Behrends Frank and Kenneth Brummel (eds), Prestel, 244pp, $50 (hb)