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Lot Essay
By the time the First World War ended in November 1918, Picasso had already embarked on two parallel but dissimilar lines in his painting that would carry him well into in the next decade. On one hand, he continued to mine the cubist vein, which he felt best suited his fascination for the seemingly infinite variety of ways in which an artist could compose and paint a still life. On the other, he pursued his passion for the figure into a headlong romance with the recent revival of Classicism. The idea of an overtly bifurcated studio production was then extremely controversial, and partisans of each manner tried to discredit Picasso’s efforts in the other. To Picasso’s mind, however, these contrasting notions were but the twin sides of the same coin, the totality of his art.
With an eye on the past, Picasso in his new Classicism typically articulated a solemn and portentous beauty, existing outside of time and place. In the cubist still life, however, the artist liked to tell a different story, as he continued to indulge his inveterate taste for fun and games, as evident in the present lot. Cubism, an art of the here and now, could make its point with the most ordinary of objects, which may hold a personal and often humorous significance for the artist. The ace of clubs lends this painting its title, but its presence is less noticeable at first glance than the artist’s pipe and pouch of tobacco, also seen in a related painting of early 1919 (Zervos, vol. 6, no. 1375). Propped on a pipe box, in the company of a couple of books, this amiable assemblage rests atop a white table, which casts its shadow onto a harlequinesque chequered café floor.
This composition is the artist’s tribute to various pleasurable pursuits – smoking, card-playing, reading, and love-making, too; the picture is shot through with sexual allusions. Read the pipe as a phallus, the pouch of tobacco as the female erogenous zone, the pipe box as a bed. The ace of clubs is a lucky card, and for the cubists it signified a sudden, welcome turn of good fortune and success.
The enduring legacy that Cubism left to modern art is indeed its radical analysis of pictorial form; it moreover provided a plastic framework in which visual form facilitates the play of poetic metaphor. Cubism enabled, condoned and ultimately celebrated the co-existence of multiple realities, while suggesting and revealing layers of meaning, and served as a portal to a larger, more inclusive experience of the world as it might be transformed into art. ‘Our subjects might be different, as we have introduced into painting objects and forms that were formerly ignored’, Picasso declared. ‘We have kept our eyes open to our surroundings, and also our brains...We keep the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected; our subject itself must be a source of interest’ (Picasso, quoted in op. cit., 1972, p. 6).
With an eye on the past, Picasso in his new Classicism typically articulated a solemn and portentous beauty, existing outside of time and place. In the cubist still life, however, the artist liked to tell a different story, as he continued to indulge his inveterate taste for fun and games, as evident in the present lot. Cubism, an art of the here and now, could make its point with the most ordinary of objects, which may hold a personal and often humorous significance for the artist. The ace of clubs lends this painting its title, but its presence is less noticeable at first glance than the artist’s pipe and pouch of tobacco, also seen in a related painting of early 1919 (Zervos, vol. 6, no. 1375). Propped on a pipe box, in the company of a couple of books, this amiable assemblage rests atop a white table, which casts its shadow onto a harlequinesque chequered café floor.
This composition is the artist’s tribute to various pleasurable pursuits – smoking, card-playing, reading, and love-making, too; the picture is shot through with sexual allusions. Read the pipe as a phallus, the pouch of tobacco as the female erogenous zone, the pipe box as a bed. The ace of clubs is a lucky card, and for the cubists it signified a sudden, welcome turn of good fortune and success.
The enduring legacy that Cubism left to modern art is indeed its radical analysis of pictorial form; it moreover provided a plastic framework in which visual form facilitates the play of poetic metaphor. Cubism enabled, condoned and ultimately celebrated the co-existence of multiple realities, while suggesting and revealing layers of meaning, and served as a portal to a larger, more inclusive experience of the world as it might be transformed into art. ‘Our subjects might be different, as we have introduced into painting objects and forms that were formerly ignored’, Picasso declared. ‘We have kept our eyes open to our surroundings, and also our brains...We keep the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected; our subject itself must be a source of interest’ (Picasso, quoted in op. cit., 1972, p. 6).