Verre et bouteille sur une table

Combining a variety of techniques, media, and representational styles, Pablo Picasso’s Verre et bouteille sur une table of 1913 demonstrates the artist's radical pictorial innovation. Here, Picasso is playing with conventional modes of representation, artfully disrupting the accepted rules that governed picture making. Picturing a simple still life, Picasso has depicted the white table cloth with a flat piece of collaged paper, over and surrounding which he has drawn two illusionistic renderings of the side and leg of the table. The glass and a bottle of Bass beer—a diamond cut out imitating its logo—are similarly composed of pieces of paper over which the artist affixed sawdust. In this way he has turned what should be smooth, transparent, three-dimensional objects into textured, opaque, and two-dimensional surfaces. In a closely related work (Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 441; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) Picasso has inversed this compositional construction; the paper cut-out glass and bottle are pasted upon a background of sawdust.
It was Georges Braque who invented the cubist practice of papier collé. Braque and Picasso spent the summer of 1912 in Sorgues, a suburb of Avignon. After spending these weeks together consolidating and experimenting with their latest cubist developments, Picasso returned to Paris while Braque remained behind. It was at this time that he found a roll of faux bois paper in an Avignon wallpaper shop. Taking the development Picasso had made in his first cubist “collage” a few months earlier Nature morte à la chaise cannée (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 294; Musée Picasso, Paris), Braque began to cut up and integrate these pieces of faux bois into his cubist compositions. The papier collé was born. “I have to admit that after having made the papier collé [Compotier et verre], I felt a great shock,” Braque later recalled, “and it was an even greater shock for Picasso when I showed it to him” (quoted in W. Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 40). It did not take long for Picasso to experiment with this device in his own work. He wrote from Paris at the beginning of October, “I am using your latest papery and powdery procedures” (quoted in A. Umland, Picasso Guitars 1912-1914, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011, p. 20).
The invention of this technique came at a critical time in the development of Cubism. Both artists realized they had exhausted Analytical Cubism; they had removed everything—color, depth, volume, modeling, perspective—to such an extent that they could go no further. As a result, they looked once again to reality, using elements of real life to once again undermine the tenets of illusionism. They had already begun to include stenciled lettering in their compositions, before starting to integrate real objects, sand, sawdust and other materials, pieces of wallpaper, faux-bois, and carefully chosen cuttings of newspapers and ephemera. As a result, Cubism was transformed as reality itself was integrated into the two-dimensional confines of the canvas, thereby opening up new directions in the conception not only of a painting, but of art itself. As the present work masterfully shows, the inclusion of paper enabled Picasso to blur the boundaries between the real and represented; the optical fact and the illusion.
Verre et bouteille sur une table was formerly in the collection of Pierre Chareau, the French architect and interior designer famed for designing the Maison de Verre (1932), an iconic Modernist house located on Paris’s Left Bank, which was constructed from steel and glass. Friends with many of the leading figures of the Parisian avant-garde including André Breton, Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Louis Aragon, among others, Chareau also created furniture for the films of avant-garde director Marcel l’Herbier. The present work features in a scene of L’Inhumaine (1924). Over the course of his life he acquired a notable art collection including works by Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso.
This work subsequently entered the collection of George Henry and Katherine Urquhart Warren. While George Warren was a former director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Katherine was the founder and president of the Preservation Society of Newport County, a society aimed at preserving the Rhode Island town’s vernacular architecture, including its famed Gilded Age mansions. In addition to her passionate advocacy for architectural conservation, Warren also collected modern art, with artists such as Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, Braque and Mondrian forming the basis of her collection. A donor and later a Trustee of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, she also loaned a number of works to the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.