Absinthe Drinker Spy

                               Pablo Picasso: The Absinthe Drinker                 1901

                 I confess I have never liked Picasso, either as an artist or as a person. My dislike roots from a book about Mona Lisa’s theft from the Louvre, when Picasso was questioned about it before the court and he did not behave as a true friend. Perhaps my preconception led me to dislike his art works, but lately I have found paintings of his that I like very much.

             There is a Picasso work in the Musee d’Orsay, The Absinthe Drinker. The oil painting depicts a woman, side-faced, sitting at a café’s terrace table with a glass of absinthe, which was an indispensable element that time.

             The woman has very large, bony hands like a witch’s and she looks like she could bewitch the thing or person she is looking at. She is very creepy. She has a sharp nose, a sharp chin, forcibly sharp lips, and those razor-sharp eyes that could kill instantly. She is like, hmm…she is like a man.

        My theory is that this man is spying on someone, and just disguising himself as an absinthe-drinking woman. There is no connection between the glass of alcohol and the figure; he does not drink it, he does not touch it, he does not look at it. His gaze is so trenchant, so sober, I bet he did not drink the absinthe at all, not even a drop. The green drink is just a mystification.

            The man is following a conversation. He does it so intently that his ear becomes red. He seems to be aligning his hair with his hand but in reality, he is putting his hand to his ear just to hear the conversation better. Picasso marked the telltale signs with powerful red paint: the already mentioned eavesdropping ear, the hate-filled eyes, the tense lips, the sniffing, beak-like nose. They are all marked red. The dark, black background with the shaded figures strengthens my “spy” theory. This is a damn good painting.

      Call me whacky, call my theory a phantasm, but this is my interpretation. If I am not right, at least this painting helped me like Pablo Picasso, the artist.