Nature morte

The still-life was a genre that Picasso explored with an endless passion throughout his career. Indeed, the artist’s biographer, John Richardson, has gone so far as to say that it was a theme that Picasso “would eventually explore more exhaustively and develop more imaginatively than any other artist in history” (J. Richardson, quoted in J. Sutherland Boggs, Picasso & Things, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992, p. 13). From the very beginning of his career, this genre played a vital role in the artist’s work. The still-life was absolutely central to Cubism, one of the most innovative movements of the Twentieth Century. Picasso completely reconfigured the genre as he deconstructed the nature of representation. These radical artistic aims led to the intense focus on inanimate, inexpressive objects. As the 1920s dawned, the artist was effortlessly switching between Neo-Classicism and Synthetic Cubism, creating works composed of rhythmically interlocking planes and facets that reveal the artist’s innate ability at composing and constructing images using still-life objects. By the 1930s, Picasso’s still-lifes, like so much of his work, became steeped in autobiography. Biomorphic, exuberant and boldly colored, these paintings took on a potent erotic symbolism, with each curve and line evoking the sensuous, voluptuous form of his youthful, golden-haired muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
In sharp, startling contrast to these sensual visions of plenty, Picasso’s wartime still-lifes are some of the most powerful, intense and austere of the artist’s career. “I have not painted the war,” the artist maintained, “But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done” (Picasso, quoted in S.A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years, 1937-1945, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1999, p. 13). Unable to travel, and more or less confined to his studio, Picasso produced a great number of still-lifes throughout the war. Darkness pervades as these paintings resonate with a somber restraint and haunting power. Depicting an assortment of foods, quotidian objects, candles or skulls set within the artist’s studio on the rue des Grands Augustins, these works express the angst, tensions and privations of life in a city under enemy rule.
Gradually, following the end of the war in 1945, a renewed sense of optimism infiltrated Picasso’s work, and, by the summer of 1946, light, color, and a joie de vivre flooded his paintings once more.
The present work was part of an extensive collection of over 100 works formed throughout the 1950s and 60s. The collection contained works by the towering figures of 20th century art such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst, among others. Often acquired either directly from the artists with whom the collector, a German émigré to the US in the 1930s, shared personal friendships, or through their primary dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Aimé Maeght, historic figures in their own right.