The Wait is a portrait of a morphine addict or prostitute painted in quick flowing highly colorful strokes with a partly divisionist pictorial treatment. Likewise, the energetic thick brushstrokes – an influence from Van Gogh – and the black outline of the figure – also a feature of some Van Gogh works and the French Les Nabis artistic movement – are worth commenting on.
The noted chromatism lets us see how Picasso here felt captivated by the play of lights and how much he enjoyed using color. The extensive red was used to color both the dress and the hat as well as the face – lips, make-up – and also to fleck the back wall.
At the start of his career Picasso, like most young artists, was in search of a style of his own. His earliest exhibited works had been executed in an academic style reminiscent of many of the salon painters of the mid to late nineteenth century. After his first trip to Paris in 1900, however, Picasso experimented with a number of new painterly vocabularies derived from some of the key artists of the day. Picasso was particularly interested in the representation of social outcasts, and for this, he looked to the works of Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. He also admired the stylistic innovations of these painters, whose use of heightened colors and frequently exaggerated forms adopted a more expressive, individualistic approach to painting, largely derived from late-nineteenth-century French Symbolism.
In The Wait, Picasso draws upon the work of a number of contemporary artists. In addition to the three mentioned above, he is also showing awareness of the claustrophobic spaces and loose handling of the Nabi painters, including Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard.
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