How a Picasso Painting Helped Me Move Past Numbness After Trauma

I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life.

On the surface, Pablo Picasso’s 1903 painting The Tragedy appears deceptively simple. Rendered in the monochromatic cool hues characteristic of his famous blue period, this work depicts a bereaved family on a beach. The mother is turned away and cradling something unseen in her arms, the father has his arms crossed over his chest, and the young son reaches an empathetic hand out to his father’s leg. Something terrible has happened to this family. Loss permeates every detail and is present in the dark folds of clothing, the strangely serene water lapping the shore, how every member of this family is barefoot, the woman standing apart and alone, and the man’s downcast gaze. Only the boy’s face has glimmers of hope and innocence, his lack of understanding evident in the fact that his eyes are open, the only one who can bear to look at the landscape.

I first encountered The Tragedy at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, when I was eighteen years old. It felt like spotting a familiar person across the room. The work is approximately forty-one inches tall and twenty-seven inches wide, oil on wood, yet its inescapable scene loomed larger. As I ventured closer to the painting, my breath became increasingly labored and my chest felt constricted. I trembled. I braced myself for a panic attack, the kind that had grown commonplace in my daily existence—a pounding heart, tunnel vision, dizziness, the fear that I was in imminent danger.

Instead, my mind became very still and quiet. Next, a complex array of emotions—deep sadness, longing, glimmers of love—welled up within my body without warning. These feelings traveled as tremors up my muscles, tendons, and nerve endings with a raw sort of energy. For months, I had been frozen, unable to feel anything except currents of terror. Only later did I learn the language to describe this state as “emotional numbing,” a hallmark of chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I don’t remember fleeing the museum, but I do recall being outside the building when my steps quickened from a hurried walk into a jog. By the time I’d crossed 7th Avenue, I was at a full run. I ran as if I could outpace the eruption of feelings churning up inside me. I ran until a stabbing stitch grew long in my side, until I couldn’t breathe, and my shoes were filled with tiny pebbles from the national mall path. When I finally stopped running, I folded over, collapsed to the ground, and wept uncontrollably. My body shivered with the effort of crying, my skin burned with the shame of being so exposed. I felt the eyes of the people walking by me trying hard not to stare.

Art conservationists suspected as early as 1983 that other works might be hidden under the surface of The Tragedy. Clues like the visible anomalies in the light detail on the arm of the man as well as hints of yellow and orange paint peeking out beneath the blue background pointed to other layers. In 1997, x-radiography and infrared reflectography revealed three distinct works. Spectral infrared imaging research published in 2016 confirmed previous guesswork and provided a clear image of each layer. The first layer is a series of simple drawings, similar to the whimsical doodles from Picasso’s sketchbook in 1899. Next is a painting bursting with warm yellows and bright orange hues showing a stadium scene. This painting was likely a bullfight scene similar in color and scope to other completed works from 1901, including La Corrida and Bullfighting Scene (The Victims). The third layer depicts another bullring scene, this time with human figures and a bridled horse dragging a dead horse out of the stadium.

For a long time, it was assumed that Picasso painted directly over old works because he couldn’t afford new canvases. But now, clarity of the hidden images beneath the visible work reveals that early sketches and paintings informed the shape and subject of the final work. The silhouettes of the bullring scenes form the adult figures in The Tragedy, providing structure, depth, and meaning. The outline of the dead horse’s head is hidden in the woman’s cloak, and the plume of feathers from the bridled horse pulling the weight of the dead beast is transformed into the downcast head of the father.

The hidden images beneath Picasso’s visible works reveal that early sketches and paintings informed the shape and subject of the final works.

This layering speaks to the nature of tragedy itself: Tragedy never exists in isolation as a single, frozen event. Suffering is not only in the moment of trauma, but in reconciling and accepting the change that has taken place. The layers beneath The Tragedy give a sense of the time before, while the image we see is a glimpse of the aftermath. Taken as a whole, we are given an opportunity to view the transformation from before to after, the evolution caused by tragedy.

While these layers were not obvious to me when I first encountered The Tragedy, there was a sense of their truth bubbling up under the surface. Before that critical moment in the gallery, I had spent months living in the aftermath of the trauma of being raped and abducted by my ex-boyfriend. While other people my age were starting college and tasting freedom for the first time, I was isolated in a nightmare. I could not easily fall asleep or stay asleep for long before bad dreams would have me jolting upright in bed, heart racing so fast I could hear nothing but its beats in my ears. I couldn’t bear to be touched, my skin had grown too thin and fragile. Flashbacks of the assault would swell in my mind at random, unexpected intervals. My appetite had vanished, and I could barely eat; food, like other previous pleasures, brought no joy or satisfaction.

The relentless cycle continued for months until, overwhelmed, I became exhausted and emotionally numb. I remember waiting for the bus and then the metro all winter that year, exposed to the cold. Why did I not buy myself a coat? I don’t recall even considering it. Warmth, like all other feelings, was entirely unattainable and lost. It felt as if my whole self, every layer of my identity, had been erased.

The Tragedy showed me that the shape and pattern of my previous self still existed beneath the surface, and had only been covered over by my experience. I understood in the process of breaking open from numbness that I was not in fact dead. I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was, instead, changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life.

Layering speaks to the nature of tragedy itself: Tragedy never exists in isolation as a single, frozen event. 

Eventually, I went back to the museum seeking another glimpse of The Tragedy. I analyzed the work as if it were an equation that could explain the secret that unlocked my numbness, the magic that allowed complex, bottled-up emotions to flood my mind and overwhelm my body. On this second viewing, I was able to pinpoint something in the mother and father—their demeanor and the fact that they cannot bear to look at each other or their surroundings poses an important question: How would it feel to suffer a loss and not feel, in some way, responsible? Like the boy, no doubt. In the faces of the mother and father is the shadow of the question they constantly ask themselves: Am I responsible for this terrible event?

I had been asking that same question of myself. The question built upon the questions asked of me, starting the night I was rescued from my ex-boyfriend’s car more than two hundred miles from my home—and then in the police station, and the hospital, and later at the trial. All of these questions implied my role as co-conspirator in the crime I’d suffered: “You dated him?” and “What were you wearing?” and “Did you fight back?”

Most scholars agree that Picasso’s grief following the suicide of his friend Casagemas inspired his blue period, which stretched from late 1901 to 1904. This traumatic event in young Picasso’s life dredged up the unresolved grief from his younger sister’s death from diphtheria in 1895. The blue period, by Picasso’s own account, is autobiographical in nature; in his art, he wrestled with his complicated feelings brought on by these losses.

When his sister was on her deathbed, Picasso offered a bargain to God: If he would save his sister’s life, Picasso would give up art. This was not a promise Picasso truly intended to keep, and when his sister died, Picasso felt responsible, like God was punishing him for his lie. Casagemas and Picasso were intimate friends; they’d shared living quarters and a lifestyle as emerging artists during Picasso’s first stay in Paris. When Casagemas fell in love with a woman who did not return his affection, his feelings turned to obsession. Picasso sought to distract his friend with a trip to Barcelona and Malaga during the Christmas holiday, but when this trip failed to bring solace to Casagemas, Picasso abandoned him to his dangerous brooding and fled to Madrid. Casagemas returned to Paris alone, and in February 1901, he took a gun to a cafe and accosted his beloved. Failing to kill her, he turned the weapon on himself.

The feeling of guilt, no matter how irrational, is like a poison. I felt the guilt radiating out from The Tragedy because I had been steeped in it every day since I’d been assaulted. The aftermath was an endless loop of wondering: Could I have made a different choice and altered the outcome? The woman and the man in The Tragedy felt this burden of shame, of an impossible responsibility. They were trapped inside of it, isolated and alone. But the young boy felt the sadness and loss without the guilt. The painting was like a mirror of my frozen self, and by looking at it directly, I was able to break open that part of me that had been imprisoned by guilt.

I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was, instead, changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life. 

Picasso once said: “Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it is a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.” He created The Tragedy as a means to embrace and transform his own loss and grief. Part of The Tragedy’s power is rooted in the process of creation, using layers of color, emotion, and memory that resonate through to the surface. While each image of The Tragedy can now be isolated and examined, it is only as a collective where the work achieves true beauty. The layers of trauma can never be covered over completely.

Encountering The Tragedy didn’t heal me, but it opened the way to feeling again. Feeling became the first step to reconciling who I’d been before with who I’d become, and to start along a path to find meaning in that change. This painting is imbued with a magic that reveals to me all the versions of myself bound together. Once I stumbled through my life numb and partially dead, unable to observe or escape the landscape of violent blue. Then, one day, I stood before a powerful work of art that opened my eyes, unlocked me from a loop of pain, and fueled my imagination for a world beyond a single color and layer.