By Reid Rosefelt
When I was a teenager growing up in a tiny Wisconsin town, Chicago was the Big City, and The Art Institute was the only major museum I had been to in my life. My favorite gallery there was the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. I could gaze at the huge canvas of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” as well as Toulouse-Lautrec’s “At the Moulin Rouge,” van Gogh’s “The Room,” and many others by such masters as Gauguin, Rousseau, Modigliani, Cézanne, and Matisse. For me, these paintings were celebrities. Being in the room with them was as thrilling as being in the same room with Bob Dylan or Jack Nicholson.
Despite all the riches, I found myself drawn to a single painting: Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” an iconic image from his Blue Period. I loved the painting, but my real fascination was with something hidden underneath it. Behind the old man’s blue head I could see the face of a beautiful woman, her lips resting behind his ear, her neck flowing out from the Platysma muscle in his neck, and her ghostly eyes burning into my own.
