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Lot Essay
Painted on 12 December 1943, Picasso's Nature morte aux verres is a powerful still life dating from the years of Paris' Occupation during the Second World War.
Picasso's most frequent subjects during the Occupation were the figure and still life, and the two became reflexive to the point of interchangeability. In both cases Picasso used his figures and objects as vehicles for imbued and suggestive meditations on the war, never addressing it directly. There was no equivalent of Guernica (postcards of which he reportedly gave to German visitors); as part of his effort to maintain a life and livelihood in Paris, Picasso shunned overtly political painting. However, the situation shone through clearly like an X-Ray image, defining the paintings of the period. "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict," Picasso said. "But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done. Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my style has changed under the war's influence. Myself, I do not know" (quoted in S.A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years 1937-1945, exh. cat., Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1998, p. 13). In the stylized geometric forms and jutting, angular planes of the background of Nature morte aux verres the presence of the war is clear and implicit. Picasso not only vents, but also translates his angst. There is an intense sense of confinement which, while real for the artist in his rue des Grands-Augustins studio, fills this painting with a sense of oppression which remains real to the modern viewer.
Describing his activity during this period, Picasso told Harriet and Sidney Janis that "There was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly, and look forward to freedom" (quoted in M. McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, Princeton, 1997, p. 224).
Picasso's most frequent subjects during the Occupation were the figure and still life, and the two became reflexive to the point of interchangeability. In both cases Picasso used his figures and objects as vehicles for imbued and suggestive meditations on the war, never addressing it directly. There was no equivalent of Guernica (postcards of which he reportedly gave to German visitors); as part of his effort to maintain a life and livelihood in Paris, Picasso shunned overtly political painting. However, the situation shone through clearly like an X-Ray image, defining the paintings of the period. "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict," Picasso said. "But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done. Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my style has changed under the war's influence. Myself, I do not know" (quoted in S.A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years 1937-1945, exh. cat., Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1998, p. 13). In the stylized geometric forms and jutting, angular planes of the background of Nature morte aux verres the presence of the war is clear and implicit. Picasso not only vents, but also translates his angst. There is an intense sense of confinement which, while real for the artist in his rue des Grands-Augustins studio, fills this painting with a sense of oppression which remains real to the modern viewer.
Describing his activity during this period, Picasso told Harriet and Sidney Janis that "There was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly, and look forward to freedom" (quoted in M. McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, Princeton, 1997, p. 224).