This period was influenced by the suicide of Picasso's friend, the painter Carlos Casagemas, who had shot himself in the head in a Paris café in February 1901.

[3] Picasso looks directly at the viewer "with supreme self-confidence", illustrated by the inscription "YO" in large capital letters.

[4]Picasso’s YO challenges not only us but the great Raphael portrait of Castiglione in the Louvre; make the comparison, this YO demands, my crude immediate brushwork against Raphael’s delicacy, my jarring chromatic contrasts against his tone, my furious energy against his calm, the work of half an afternoon triumphant over the work of weeks of craft and contemplation.

Even the palette is not logically laid out as we might expect, but stabbed with the short strokes of colour characteristic of a finished painting — particularly of La Nana, which may be its immediate contemporary.

Picasso’s was a YO about to trample all conventions.On 22 May 1981, Paul Richard for The Washington Post described the painting as "a confident, ferocious self-portrait".

"[5] In November 1912 Hugo von Hofmannsthal purchased Yo, Picasso from the gallery of Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich.