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Lot Essay
With an exquisite economy of means and his signature visual inventiveness, Picasso has here transformed a most quotidian scene, glimpsed on summer holiday–a fish lying beached on the shore–into an unexpected allegory of life and death. Three patterned bands, stippled and striped, suffice to set the stage, dividing the composition into narrow zones of sea and sky above a broad expanse of sand. The fish is a flounder or other flat type, stranded motionless on its belly, its two eyes round and staring. A bold diamond pattern acts as graphic shorthand for the scales, while also evoking the mesh of a fisherman’s net. Pulsing high overhead is a bright white sun, the principal antagonist in this powerfully condensed pictorial drama, with its shallow space and starkly schematized forms. Life-consuming rather than life-giving, the sun traps the fish within an angular plane of light that slices into the seascape from above, effectively sealing the aquatic creature’s doom.
Picasso painted this Poisson échoué at Dinard on the Brittany coast, where he vacationed with his wife Olga and their toddler son Paulo in July-September 1922. The trio set up residence in the Villa Beauregard, an elegant Second Empire abode perched high above the sea on the main coastal route, just a short walk from the bathing beach. The house boasted a lovely garden and stunning views across the water to Saint-Malo, but nothing much for studio space, unlike the previous summer’s rental at Fontainebleau. Undeterred, Picasso stocked up on smaller scaled canvases and set to work, painting heavily classicizing Maternités on the one hand and still-lifes in a radically reduced, cubist idiom on the other. “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them,” he explained, defending his protean methods to partisans of each post-war style (“Picasso Speaks,” The Arts, May 1923; D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, p. 5).
During his stay at Dinard, Picasso created more than a dozen tabletop still-lifes that feature fish as food, most often resting atop the fishmonger’s newspaper wrapping; in one case, he painted just the tail of a tuna, before a window with slatted blinds and a view of the sea. Yet Poisson échoué is alone in Picasso’s work from that summer–a distinct and individual statement–in capturing a life-and-death struggle at the water’s edge. The simplified, sign-like form of the fish anticipates numerous ceramics that Picasso would later produce at Vallauris, which celebrate the joys of the seashore in playfully whimsical fashion. Thematically, however, the panel is the precursor of a much weightier work, the mural-sized Pêche de nuit à Antibes of 1939, in which a fisherman spears a flatfish beneath a bright acetylene lamp–an artificial sun–that lures unsuspecting marine life into its orbit. “I want to draw the mind in a direction it’s not used to and wake it up,” Picasso declared. “I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn’t have discovered without me” (quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 60).
Picasso painted this Poisson échoué at Dinard on the Brittany coast, where he vacationed with his wife Olga and their toddler son Paulo in July-September 1922. The trio set up residence in the Villa Beauregard, an elegant Second Empire abode perched high above the sea on the main coastal route, just a short walk from the bathing beach. The house boasted a lovely garden and stunning views across the water to Saint-Malo, but nothing much for studio space, unlike the previous summer’s rental at Fontainebleau. Undeterred, Picasso stocked up on smaller scaled canvases and set to work, painting heavily classicizing Maternités on the one hand and still-lifes in a radically reduced, cubist idiom on the other. “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them,” he explained, defending his protean methods to partisans of each post-war style (“Picasso Speaks,” The Arts, May 1923; D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, p. 5).
During his stay at Dinard, Picasso created more than a dozen tabletop still-lifes that feature fish as food, most often resting atop the fishmonger’s newspaper wrapping; in one case, he painted just the tail of a tuna, before a window with slatted blinds and a view of the sea. Yet Poisson échoué is alone in Picasso’s work from that summer–a distinct and individual statement–in capturing a life-and-death struggle at the water’s edge. The simplified, sign-like form of the fish anticipates numerous ceramics that Picasso would later produce at Vallauris, which celebrate the joys of the seashore in playfully whimsical fashion. Thematically, however, the panel is the precursor of a much weightier work, the mural-sized Pêche de nuit à Antibes of 1939, in which a fisherman spears a flatfish beneath a bright acetylene lamp–an artificial sun–that lures unsuspecting marine life into its orbit. “I want to draw the mind in a direction it’s not used to and wake it up,” Picasso declared. “I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn’t have discovered without me” (quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 60).