A portrait of ghosts
Why does a picture this colorful feel haunted? Because of who the three players are widely thought to be. The reading most often given: the Harlequin is Picasso himself (Harlequin was his lifelong alter ego) and the other two are the friends he had made Cubism with in the poor, happy Bateau-Lavoir years. The clarinet-playing Pierrot is the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and the monk is the poet Max Jacob.
Both references cut deep. Apollinaire was dead, three years gone when Picasso painted this. And Max Jacob had, in 1921, the very year of the picture, withdrawn from the world to live at a Benedictine monastery, lost to his old friends in a different way. So the three musicians are a band that no longer exists, reassembled for one last portrait, two of them present only as masks. Picasso never confirmed the reading, and a careful viewer should hold it as the likeliest interpretation rather than a proven fact. But it is hard to stand in front of the picture, once you know, and not see a wake dressed up as a carnival.
