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Lot Essay
During the final years of the First World War and the beginning of the 1920s, Pablo Picasso turned increasingly to directly figurative styles of painting, yet as Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac reveals, he refused to abandon the Cubism which he had pioneered a decade earlier. Painted in 1919, Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac shows Picasso's continued exploration of Cubism as a means of depicting the world. In works such as this, Picasso began to explore a more liberated, lyrical evolution of Cubism, a gauntlet that he would further take up towards the end of 1919 with his celebrated series of guéridons in front of a window.
In Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac, Picasso has selected objects from what had essentially become a form of inert still life pantheon within Cubism: the glass, the pipe and tobacco. He has rendered the glass as a corrugated object, giving a sense of its transparency through the glancing appearance of the pipe's head to the side. The picture is comprised of a number of planes of colour which lend it a dynamism that is heightened by the almost Neo-Impressionistic Pointillism in the lower half, where dabs of red, purple, green, white and blue have been used to build up a textured appearance. This adds a lively shimmer to the picture, and the contrast between these effervescent areas of colour and the objects themselves adds to their appearance of solidity. Picasso had been experimenting with Pointillism in both realist and Cubist works during the previous few years, inspired perhaps by Georges Seurat, an artist represented in his own collection.
Picasso's changes in style are often associated with his changes in the women in his life, and this was particularly evident after his romance with the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom he had married the year before he painted Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac. Largely, Olga appears to have inspired Picasso's Neo-Classicism, his return to overt figuration, which he often used to celebrate her beauty. However, there was a constant undercurrent of non-figurative art, as is clear looking at Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac, in which he has created a new, vivacious permutation of his earlier Cubism. Picasso's consistent return to the language of Cubism, especially during this period, has been seen in part as a reaction to the return of Georges Braque from the First World War. Braque took up the mantle of Cubism, the way of seeing and representing the world that he had spearheaded alongside Picasso, and imbued it with a new legibility and classicism which was much lauded at the time. In Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac, Picasso appears to have carried out a similar process, yet pushing in a different, more humanising direction: he was revitalising Cubism, adding a new spin to the still life genre and crucially imbuing it - even on this intimate scale - with a playful sense of theatricality, which may owe something to his increasing involvement in set design.
In Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac, Picasso has selected objects from what had essentially become a form of inert still life pantheon within Cubism: the glass, the pipe and tobacco. He has rendered the glass as a corrugated object, giving a sense of its transparency through the glancing appearance of the pipe's head to the side. The picture is comprised of a number of planes of colour which lend it a dynamism that is heightened by the almost Neo-Impressionistic Pointillism in the lower half, where dabs of red, purple, green, white and blue have been used to build up a textured appearance. This adds a lively shimmer to the picture, and the contrast between these effervescent areas of colour and the objects themselves adds to their appearance of solidity. Picasso had been experimenting with Pointillism in both realist and Cubist works during the previous few years, inspired perhaps by Georges Seurat, an artist represented in his own collection.
Picasso's changes in style are often associated with his changes in the women in his life, and this was particularly evident after his romance with the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom he had married the year before he painted Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac. Largely, Olga appears to have inspired Picasso's Neo-Classicism, his return to overt figuration, which he often used to celebrate her beauty. However, there was a constant undercurrent of non-figurative art, as is clear looking at Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac, in which he has created a new, vivacious permutation of his earlier Cubism. Picasso's consistent return to the language of Cubism, especially during this period, has been seen in part as a reaction to the return of Georges Braque from the First World War. Braque took up the mantle of Cubism, the way of seeing and representing the world that he had spearheaded alongside Picasso, and imbued it with a new legibility and classicism which was much lauded at the time. In Verre, pipe et paquet de tabac, Picasso appears to have carried out a similar process, yet pushing in a different, more humanising direction: he was revitalising Cubism, adding a new spin to the still life genre and crucially imbuing it - even on this intimate scale - with a playful sense of theatricality, which may owe something to his increasing involvement in set design.