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 And Max Jacob had, in 1921, the very year of the picture, withdrawn from the world to live at a Benedictine monastery, lost to his old friends in a different way.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.
